Okay, so I did a very poor job in 2023 of keeping up with my completions in my blog. I blame it on the fact that the blog feature wasn't implemented until midway through the year, but I won't have that excuse in 2024...so let's get this party started!

I suppose I could've picked a better game to start the year off with, but alas, my first completion in 2024 is a bit of a dud. Although it was released during the trilogy's theatrical run, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is directly based on the book and has absolutely nothing to do with the movie of the same name, aside from being based on the same thing, of course. Now I know I might need to turn in my Nerd Card for this, but I haven't read a single page of a J. R. R. Tolkien book. I've seen the movies several times and, in fact, the only reason I played this game was because I was re-watching the trilogy around the same time.

I'm just going to come right out and say: This game isn't very good. It's not awful, but boy is it a mess. Before I start piling things on though, let me first praise the game for (seemingly) doing a great job of paying respect to the source material. As I mentioned before, I haven't read the book, but I got the sense that this game was relatively faithful to it. It seemed to do a nice job of bringing things to life and truly felt like a fantasy experience.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is where things really start to fall apart. It starts off decent enough with you exploring The Shire where you can interact with other characters and perform some side quests (which I think are only in the Xbox version.) This section was a bit slow, but I actually enjoyed it a fair amount and it reminded me of RPGs to some degree, though it was rather simplistic overall.

Things start to break down once you move out of The Shire since that's when you have to start dealing with combat. To call the combat "clunky" would be generous and in some ways I'd say it's completely broken. Poor hit box detection, sluggish controls, annoying enemies, and incredibly repetitive combat sections really weigh this game down to the point where it saps most of the fun out of it. I could've handled the poor combat a little better if it didn't make up the vast majority of gameplay once you're out of The Shire. It eventually wore me down and eventually I got the point where I just outright hated it.

The game was able to barely stay afloat by throwing in some puzzles and light exploration sections along the way. None of it was particularly noteworthy, but it was better than having to fight more enemies. Luckily, the game also has lots of cutscenes to help convey the story throughout its runtime, so at least it continued to play to its strengths in some capacity.

The only reason I finished this game is because I knew it was a relatively short game. I ended up around the six hour mark and I really wish it were about half that. I feel that The Fellowship of the Ring could've used a bit more development time to iron out the combat and because of this, I can only recommend it to the most die-hard fans of the series.

Played On: Xbox
Completion Date: 01/1/24
Time: 6 hours 15 minutes
Rating: 4/10