Guardians of Middle-Earth contains less than 2% real Tolkien

Posted by on January 2, 2013 in Reviews

When I play a game called Guardians of Middle-Earth, I don’t mind so much that it’s a Defense of the Ancients clone that doesn’t do anything different or memorable. I have Awesomenauts and Monday Night Combat for that. I don’t even really mind that it copies a game I already have — League of Legends — so shamelessly.

After the jump, what I do mind

But when I play a game called Guardians of Middle-Earth, I mind that it does so little to invoke Middle Earth. There is only the shallowest of expressions of Tolkien’s mythology, almost solely in the names of the characters and their abilities. This isn’t a visually memorable game, with its various second banana dwarfs and D-list orcs slinging splashy spell effects down the lanes. Who can tell who is who, even if you know who they’re supposed to be? Do you remember Hildifons and Felgrom? How about Runsig? Or Ugluk? These are among the characters in the game who aren’t Gandalf, Gollum, or Galadriel, who are themselves only barely Gandalf, Gollum, and Galadriel. In a game with about twenty characters, why were so many plucked from appendices?

There is no effort made to give the match any sort of Middle Earthen flavor beyond, “Hey, we’re doing this because this is how it works in Defense of the Ancients!” Why are Galadriel and Muzgog the orc — are they pulling my leg? — on the same team, fighting against another team where Galadriel and Wulfrim are paired? Who knows. Who cares. Not Guardians of Middle-Earth.

It does, however, offer specific nods to the release of the Hobbit movie. For the low low price of two dollars each, you can get four characters you know from the movie. This is in addition to the fifteen dollars you already paid for the game. Now Bilbo Baggins can slay Sauron! Repeatedly. What a shameless money grab.

Speaking of shameless, Guardians of Middle Earth is unabashedly grind-based. As you play, you earn ingame currency you spend on new characters, on slottable character improvements, and on potions that you can use once. Potions that drain your resources so you have to keep playing to stay competitive. Weak potions are cheap. Powerful potions aren’t. Spend to win.

The level of detail is very PC, with lots of numbers with little incremental improvements sprinkled hither and yon. These little increments are mostly where you build your character and choose what you’re going to do during a match. If you’ve played League of Legends, you’ll know the drill. But there is little sense of choice as you’re playing the game. In most DOTA clones, you spend resources to buy skills and/or gear during the match, changing how the game plays. In Guardians of Middle Earth, you only get an occasional point to unlock your next skill level, in a very set order that allows for minimal wiggle room. Basically, all the character choices you make are decided before the match even starts. Your build is locked in.

To Guardians’ credit, the controls are a passable solution to the lack of a mouse and keyboard (this is only available for the 360 and Playstation 3). You can upgrade defensive towers and the monsters that spawn down a lane, but there’s no real strategy in the upgrades; it’s just a bit of busywork to stay competitive. Along with actually playing to keep up with the grind.

By the way, don’t bother with certain character skills, and therefore certain characters. If it requires any precision or careful targeting, you’re going to be at a serious disadvantage due to frequent lag issues. I’ve played plenty of games on my 360 with up to ten players at a time; I can’t think of any that routinely suffer lag this bad. And these are not launch issues because the game has been out for a while now. But you’re going to have to put up with it if you’re dying to know who wins in a fight between Hildifons and Ugluk.

1 star
Xbox 360

  • http://www.facebook.com/chase.dahl.10 Chase Dahl

    Sigh. This comment section just isn’t the same without the legions of mouthbreathers flooding it with questions about Tom’s neutrality, need to drive hits to Qt3 through Metacritic trolling, or his sexuality. This was too easy of a target, Mr. Chick. I recommend a CoD retrospective.

  • Chris H.

    No mention of Frommdam?

  • wykstrad

    Seriously? Only twenty characters in a game based on a property that starts out with nine distinct good guys, and they’re picking out barely-recognizable characters to fill out the roster? I’ve only read Lord of the Rings once, and I’m pretty sure I could list. 20 primary characters more recognizable than Muzgog the orc.

    In fact, here goes: Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, Elrond, Arwen, Glorfindel, Galadriel, Gimli, Gandalf, Grima Wormtongue, Gollum (lots of G names here), Boromir, Faramir, Denethor, Eomer, Eowyn, Theoden, Saruman, Sauron, Shelob, the Witch-King of Angmar, The Balrog, Treebeard, Mouth of Sauron. Twenty-Seven without even trying. You can add in some standard dark-creature mooks to balance out the sides (Cave Troll, Uruk-Hai, Warg-Rider, etc), but this is a game that should have a lot of recognizable names.

  • anon

    Monolith Productions continues to disappoint. I mean they’re not even the best developer called Monolith anymore! Return to PC please.

  • Firestorm

    I actually find this game a decent distraction from my pc moba addiction. It feels like moba-lite. No last-hitting, no worry about an in game shop, and a 20 min time limit (in battleground mode). It makes the game a lot more fast paced than LOL or DOTA, with much more fighting players instead of farming minions. The controls are solid, I never feel like they are detrimental to my play.

    That being said, I can’t recommend this game to anyone. The lag is atrocious, a complete nightmare. I’ve probably started 100 games since release, with easily 50% of those resulting in a disconnect. Sometimes it’s right at the start, sometimes it’s right before the end of the game, resulting in my loss of hard earned in game currency. Of the other 50%, half of those have considerable amounts of lag, usually rendering the game unplayable. I hoped it was just a release problem, but nothing has changed in the past month.

    A huge disappointment.

  • BLAM!

    Had a fun spree with Awesomenauts recently, but holy moses is that space station map killing it for me. Only 3 maps so one-third of the games take place on that awful boring single room map where half the characters are worthless.

  • Mercanis

    I cringe every time a Middle Earth video games slings spells. I wish these games would commit to the Tolkien system of magic and really make the Middle Earth setting shine.

    Typos:
    “This is in addition to the fifteen dollars you already played [sic] for the game.”
    “what you’re doing [sic] to do during a match”