Every time I hear that we’re getting a new game based on The Lord of The Rings, I experience a brief moment of excitement that is inevitably followed by a sense of impending doom. Despite plenty of rich lore to draw from (and a built-in fanbase who are willing to give pretty much any game a try based on their love of the franchise alone), recent games set in Tolkien’s world have fallen painfully short.

Between the poorly received adventure game Gollum, the poorly received LOTR survival game Return to Moria, and the poorly received cozy game Tales of the Shire, it’s been a rough couple of years for Lord of The Ring games.

But things weren’t always like this.

Video games based on Lord of the Rings have existed in some capacity since 1982, with the release of Beam Software’s The Hobbit, but saw a boost in popularity after the early 2000s release of Jackson’s films. Games based on licensed properties tend to be… Well, you know how they tend to be. But by and large, Lord of the Rings games were pretty solid! Action games based on The Two Towers and Return of the King films were legitimately fun (and faithful to the source material). The MMO The Lord of the Rings Online captured hearts and minds for a decade. Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, despite being both a Final Fantasy clone and a licensed game, is in the pantheon of turn-based RPGs. This string of releases — some hits, some misses — continued up through the mid-2010s, when it arguably hit a peak.

In 2014, WB Games released Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, a third-person action-adventure title developed by Behaviour Interactive and the now-defunct Monolith Productions. No game is perfect, but Shadow of Mordor was a hell of a lot of fun, and easily the best LOTR game I’ve ever played.........

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