The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Review – Still Chasing Its Potential

When discussions over Lord of the Rings games begin, you’ll often hear the usual suspects. The two games based directly on the films, the two amazing Battle for Middle-earth games, the ongoing MMORPG, and maybe even the Diablo-esque Game Boy Advance game. So imagine the surprise when Lord of the Rings: War In The North Legacy Edition was announced.

A re-release of a game that originally launched back in November 2011… around the same time as a little game called Skyrim. This, among other things, could have been a major factor in the game’s commercial failure. With all this being said, it’s hard not to think of this as War In The North’s second chance, free from the issues it faced at the time, and now in a very nostalgia-charged era.

War In The North takes the hack-and-slash ideals set by EA’s popular film tie-ins and lightly glazes it with the ARPG genre. Choose one of three playable characters, and the game’s core loop is cutting through hordes of enemies in a storyline that loosely follows the film’s events. Each of the three characters represents a play style, with further refinement in the leveling and perk system.

There’s the Dwarf Champion, the Elven Loremaster, and the Human Ranger. The Champion provides the big two-handed melee damage, or can be built to hold the line with a one-hander and shield. The Loremaster slings spells and buffs their allies, while the Ranger is entirely selfish and just murders things with a range of weapons.

Each character has three separate skill trees, allowing players to lean into play styles or create hybrids. In truth, they’re not the most exciting of selections, with only a handful of abilities being more than passives or improvements to other abilities. They do enough to create a sense of individuality between the playable characters, even if they ultimately suffer from homogenization. This issue was, and still is, an overall theme of War In The North.

It’s not that War in the North is bad; far from it. In fact, it was always a solid enough experience that felt like it could be much more. That feeling is still present in the Legacy Edition. Combat consists of juggling heavy and light attacks while throwing out defensive maneuvers such as dodges or blocks. Unlocked abilities become options after leveling up, with each skill requiring mana to perform.

Hitting enemies unanswered prompts ‘Hero mode ’, which increases damage and allows for fancy execution animations that grant additional experience. It’s nothing deep or too crazy, but holds a strong enough line to keep combat going at a decent pace. There are some niggles with the camera lock-on, with it having the awful habit of initially focusing on enemies furthest away from you, but after a stick flick or two it’s back to the murdering.

While smashing the 576th goblin in the face in the name of honour and glory, experience points may become a little repetitive; it’s made more appealing with loot. Scattered around each linear environment are chests and dirt clumps. There are also hidden areas that only certain characters can open, but it all serves the same function. The loot itself is slight stat upgrades, with the odd piece belonging to sets. These sets give further stat increases and lean into various possible character builds. Admittedly, it does scratch an itch when you uncover a beefy new axe that spits out fire damage, but the loot never gets all that exciting. This isn’t a problem unique to War In The North, but more a reflection of a misunderstanding of how a good loot system works.

Trying to review War in the North in 2026 is tricky. There’s a sense of false nostalgia that drips from it, tasting somewhat familiar, but not quite what I think I should remember it tasting like. I’d hazard a guess that most nostalgia felt from this is simply ‘it’s the closest we’d get to the EA hack-and-slash,’ which is fine, but it does muddy the process of grading the quality of what is being played.

As a single-player experience, War In The North is fairly dull. The environments tend to melt together, rarely chiseling out an atmosphere or character, except Bree. I’d be as risky to say, if War In The North was not blessed with the Lord of the Rings license, it would struggle to be remembered. But theory crafting over such things is, at the end of all things, a waste of time, but a briefly fun waste of time, which is exactly what War In The North is.

Co-op, be it local or online, is where War In The North does its best work. Simple, shallow, bash buttons and riff on some fairly silly dialogue. Hearing a Dwarven voice bellow ‘There’s a lever over deh’ or the elf cry out how she’s aiding us, while crawling on the floor wounded, is indeed fun. And frankly…that’s all it has to be.