War In Middle Earth (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
85War In Middle Earth is a Strategy Adventure game which came out in 1988, and released by Melbourne House on the 8 and 16-bit platforms. I began to read the LOTR books for the very first time in 1988 myself, back in high school days, so lets see of this is a trip down memory lane.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 19, 20 Feb 2022, 1 Mar 2022.
Narrated, and Impressions: 20 Aug 2022
This game always felt too deep for me. Before I tried it, I watched all three reviews on the ' aulddragon' channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@aulddragon/search?query=war%20middle
He completed the game very easily in all three videos. I remember that I once tried to get into this game in the late 2000s, and found the Unofficial War In Middle Earth Fansite by Fenroth. When I looked in 2022, the site had gone down, so I had to use Wayback Machine on Archive.org.
http://aaronwillisillustration.net/classicfantasyepics/wimehistory.htm
I had a dry run where I reached Rivendell before I started the recorder, and the actual play went very similarly. Trying to get the characters to do things was difficult. I cut out getting lost in the barrow downs, and struggling to find the tree branch in Buckland. The game crashed a few times randomly. I think I avoided talking to treebeard the second time, and just went to trigger the Ents. Most of the middle part of the war was also skipped in the video, and when Aragorn died I had to reload from Lorien all over again. I used the Command Ents trick to move them to Edoras and Helms Deep, but this is actually an undocumented cheat. The forces of Mordor take ages, and 100,000 orcs still block the mountain pass. I failed to save up enough for this battle on my first go, and I used saves to go back and try again. Minas Tirith fell on one of my plays, and this triggered the game over screen, which is in the video. I remember coming back to play it during the following week, and I recorded an hour of me playing the whole War again (from Aragorn reaching Minas Tirith), perhaps the following weekend. It felt good to come back and finally beat the game.
The Peter Jackson LOTR films were perhaps the last franchise I went to see at the cinema. I was at College, and was married with a child as the last one came out I think. I've probably seen the uncut movies too many times, as I don't relish the thought of watching them again any time soon. The idea of using impressions in the video was there from when I did the narration. There was meant to be a Gimli 'And MY Axe!" line, and maybe a few others a well, but they got cut because I lost the edge after practising them. It was hard to get my voice down to Christopher Lee. I used an effect to lower my voice in pitch, but the impression was more or less spot on to how you heard it in the review. The Gandalf sounded much better in rehearsal. By the time I came to 'You Shall Not Pass' and the end monologue, my voice was worn out, so that's why the ending sounds almost nothing like Christopher Lee until the very end bit. The image I used for Gandalf was from a green-screen 'making of' video on youtube. The credits music for these reviews were researched and put aside before the editing process started in 2021, so this is one I found on one of my searches.
Danscore:
The maker of Lords Of Midnight managed to make a game which is similarly huge, but far less engaging, with far less to see and do. The game feels deep at first glance, but after walking down to the meaty end of the map, the only thing to do is face the war of Middle Earth, and then send in the Hobbits once all the smoke clears. Simply walking to Mordor is made harder by the fact the characters have a will of their own; which is not helpful most of the time. As the war begins, gathering your troops is like trying to heard ants, and you have to ensure they all make it to Minas Tirith; especially the cavalry, even though this means leaving your Western cities weak in defence. The idea of merging units together doesn't always work in practice, and you can end up with clumps of similar units; which do not merge into one big group unless you split them off and force it. The war scenario is difficult but predictable, and this harms replay value. The thousands of images of the landscape and characters is wasted when there are very few lines of dialogue from the books to read, and so very few reasons to zoom in to this view apart from picking up the occasional item. I do love the graphics and the unique atmosphere, thanks to the music and SFX, but gameplay feels like an on-rails text adventure, with a basic turn-based battle system thrown in. You can walk south from The Shire at the start, and probably win the war using Frodo at Minas Tirith. So I give it 6.5 out of 10.