One of the main pleasures of book The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien was that it rarely succumbed to the power of the genre trope and managed to mostly surprise the readers with the ways his universe worked, from the courage of the small hobbits to the ambiguous powers of the wizards of the conflict.Unfortunately the latest video game incarnation of The Lord of the Rings, which bears the name War in the North, does not do justice to the book or the movie and creates an experience that aims to take the unique nature of Tolkien's work and pour it into categories that we're very familiar with.

Mechanically the game is pretty sound although there's nothing here that impresses me or seems innovative enough to justify an investment from fans of the Lord of the Rings universe.

The player chooses a class and an origin and then, together with two companions and after a brief encounter with a badly modeled Aragorn, he moves off to locations set in the North of Middle-Earth in order to fight the forces of Sauron as commanded by a servant with unspecified powers and a name which includes at least one umlaut.

I chose the dwarf warrior and I watched as, from a third person perspective, I cleaved through and shot at quite a few goblins and orcs in order to progress through linear levels with rather long loading times and no real tactical challenges.

The team work is almost non-existent and the enemies seem a little tougher than they should be given that they are lowliest members of the armies of Sauron.

The graphics also fail to impress, especially when it comes to textures and backgrounds, although the combat animations are pretty fluid even for my bulky dwarf.

Here's a look at The Lord of the Rings: War in the North in action: