The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest Review

From the Vault — originally published December 7, 2010. Some links, videos or prices may be out of date.

Does this action adventure do justice to the Playstation Move controls? Read on to find out.

When I first heard about the Playstation Move one of my major concerns was that it was to become like the Wii in terms of 3rd part shovelware being released for it.

Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest is a prime example of how the Move controller should not be used. Before we go into the controls let me tell you about the game it’s self.

Aragorn’s Quest is set after the events of the Lord of the Rings books/films and can only be described as an RPG for Kiddies. Samwise Gamgee is now the mayor of Hobbiton and is living a nice peaceful life with his wife and children in the Shire.

It comes to his attention that King Aragorn is coming to the Shire to visit and Sam believes it’s a perfect time for a party.
In preparation for the King’s arrival you take control of Sam’s son, Frodo and use the Shire as a kind of hub world which also acts as a tutorial to the main game.

Frodo is tasked with helping the different hobbits set up stalls and seek items needed for the party. He can also play with his friends and venture into the woods and play imaginary quests based on the events of the films. Setting up the stalls allow Frodo to learn how to use a sword and shield, a bow and ride a horse which all translate over to the main game. He can also earn coins which are also used to unlock different ablities in the main game.

Whenever you get fed up of playing in the Shire you can return to your father and continue with Aragorns Quest. This is set up by the children sat by Sam whilst he reads his book tells the story of Aragorn.

Aragorns Quest’s take you through all the main parts of the film that Aragorn was involved with, that means the battles of Helms Deep and Minas Tirith and also exploring Fangorn Forest searching for the kidnapped hobbits Merry and Pippin.

Each level is quite expansive and can take quite along time to finish. Other than your main objective you will come across different side quests that you can either complete or just ignore them completely depending on how fast you want to run through the game. There is also a ton of things to collect. There are Fellowship tokens with grant increased abilities to the different members of the Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf, Gimli, and Legolas. Lore items, such as Bilbo’s Mithril Shirt can also be found throughout the world. It is possible to collect everything in one play through but for those that have missed certain items the game allows you to replay any previous chapter after you have completed one play through, so there is some replay ability.

Combat also plays a major part in this game and this is where the game begins to go downhill. The Move controls are, simply put, horrible. They basically consist of waving your arms about like a crazy person to try and mimic the actions of using the sword. It is the epitome of waggle. Some strikes require specific gestures such as an upward or downward slam and when these moves are performed when the prompt appears on screen they deal a greater amount of damage to the enemy than it would just keep trying to fire them out in quick succession. There is so much combat that your arms quickly get tired. Put it this way, my arms were hurting after 10 minutes, the game took me around 7 hours to complete.

The Navigation controller is compatible and naturally controls Aragorn’s movement. The chances of anyone older than 12 years old using the Move controls through the entire experience are pretty slim I would imagine. The game does however give you the option to use the Dualshock 3 controller instead. An option I quickly took advantage of. This is only a small improvement though because even though your arms won’t hurt your thumb sure will. You see the majority of your time in combat will be spent mashing the square button because is Aragorns quick attack and deals the most damage. He does have secondary weapons such as a bow and spear but chances of you needing to use them are only when the game forces you too.

There are no combos and Aragorn only receives the ability of a heavy attack around ¾ of the way through the game. Another problem with the controls is the fact that you can not control the camera, this makes sense when using Move controls but after switching to the Dualshock it becomes such an annoyance because the right analogue stick becomes useless. This makes it very hard to follow the action when you are surrounded by a group of enemies and the camera will also sometimes get stuck between the environments. It’s like even though they allowed Dualshock compatibility they didn’t flesh it out properly, basically just to show the game was made specifically with the Playstation Move in mind. Despite this I would still recommend playing through the game with the Dualshock as it makes it a better experience even if it’s only a slight improvement.

The graphics are another downfall for this game. It seems like it is not being run on an engine built for the PS3 but something older, environments are bland and bare, character models are horrible, even the CG cut scenes that occur at the beginning of each level when it shows Sam reading the story to his children, look like they were made years ago. It comes as no surprise them that the game also runs terribly. Screen tear is a constant issue throughout and there are a ton of frame rate issues, sometimes slowing the game down to a crawl.

You can definitely tell that not a lot of polish went into the game and it was merely created to not only cash in on the Lord of the Rings brand but to also get a full blown action game out there that was playable with the Playstation Move instead of just party games and on-rails shooters.

At the beginning of this review I said this game was an RPG for kiddies, and I say that because it feels like a watered down RPG with no depth that kids would actually enjoy. There are side quests, options to upgrade your character, lots to collect, but yet there is no blood, no levelling system, no grind and the whole game looks like it was made to cater to the kiddie crowd who just got a Playstation move for Christmas or for the parents who want a game their kids can play on their system where they do not have to deal with the complexity of a controller.

I think if you aged between 8-12 then you will enjoy this game, anyone older will soon become bored of the horrible controls, bland environments and uninteresting side quests.

I wasn’t expecting much from Aragorn’s Quest and the game didn’t deliver anything to me that made me believe it was worthwhile to play through. I honestly got no fun or joy from this and only played it to the end for the purpose of this review. Leave Aragorn’s Quest for the kids and for us older gamers we can look forward to next years War in the North.