Lord Of The Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Gold Edition (PC)

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-06-28 rating:
Incredibly Illegal Activity I Think!
I would treat anything from Codemasters with caution!
I live in the UK and played on the European servers. I bought the game from the shops and did everything above board. I have a standard broadband connection and dont even know how to do anything dodgy with computers!
And so I was playing for several months and then was suddenly banned! Why? Because I had been logging on from multpile IP addresses!!!! This was the very reason they gave me! I queried Codemasters customer services and they repeatedly gave me the same answer without any further explanation! After a while, they just stopped returning my e-mails!
I had lost months worth of playing and money!!! And there was nothing I could do about it and was told nothing more than "I had been accessing the game through multiple IP addresses"!!!
I think it is disgusting the way I have been treated and having taken the time to go through other reviews, there are others who have had a similar experience! I would treat this game with caution as you too could find yourself in this situation!
I have played many MMORPGs over the years (UO, SWG, WoW, Lineage etc...) but never have I come across this treatment before!
This company does not deserve your business! I would take your money elsewhere if I were you!

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review by: date: 2008-05-23 rating:
An Honest review from a general Online Gamer
There are so many reviews to choose from here and most seem so biased, it can leave a gamer feeling lost as to whether the game is good or not after all. So I decided the best thing would be to write an un-biased review of this game.

First of all, if you want a detailed description of the game and what makes it good and what doesn't, read some reviews in PC magazines or on sites such as IGN etc. Those people know what they're talking about.

Okay first of all, I am a Tolkien fan. So in that sense I was very excited about this game. But I wasn't getting my hopes up for as some of you know, this game was in, what they call, production-hell for a really long time! But when it came up for pre-order, I felt compelled to order the collector's edition. At this time I had been playing WoW for about a year. I didn't think anything could beat my love for WoW, how wrong I was...

Lord of the Rings Online surpassed all my expectations. AT first I felt like I was playing a Tolkien wannabe game The reason for this is because I started in an area called Edhelion, which I had never heard of before, and I was under the impression that the whole game was not going to take place in the main areas from the book), but this only lasted for about 5 minutes. As soon as I saw the AMAZING attention to detail, I was blown away. When I got to The Shire (where the Hobbits live) I think I felt a tear to my eye. I felt like a tourist, because the middle-earth they created in this game is just so gorgeous! It truly feels like a living, breathing world. Before I realized it, my WoW account had been suspended because I hadn't paid for it. At this time I realized that saying to myself "I am not attached to this game" would have been denial. I was just enjoying it so much. The graphics are breath-taking, the music is flawless and the game is just plain fun!

I still, however, play WoW. I love both games like they're my children... but LOTRO seems to be my guilty favourite.

I feel some people have personal vendettas about this game. For example, a previous reviewer said that the community on LOTRO isn't friendly and they forced him back to WoW. Being a WoW player myself, I was shocked at the amount of WoW players logging onto LOTRO, just to moan about how much they hate the game. Does it make you wonder whether they provoked players of LOTRO? I think so. This is an online game after all so of course people will discuss which game they prefer etc. but I have never met people on LOTRO who will not help you because you're a WoW player. I'm sure if I went onto the WoW servers and moaned like that, they would kick me out too! That brings me to my next point... download times. I see many people complaining about that. This is an online game after all, you have to be aware that they make patches for it regulary! When I bought WoW I also spent a good few hours downloading patches. But I think the problem comes from one major difference between WoW's patches and LOTRO's patches: their size. And there is nothing wrong with that either! Now what I'm about to say may sound like a nasty judgement on WoW but one can't deny the truth. The LOTRO patches are by far, much better than WoW patches. The LOTRO patches add whole new areas to the game and amazing new features not seen in other games. Whilst it takes Blizzard a whole pay-for expansion to bring a new area into WoW, Codemasters does that for you, for free! If you read the game forums, Codemasters are always taking note of all in-game problems and in my opinion they do address them! Please take note that most negative reviews of this game seem to be vendettas rather than objective and logical opinions.

Having said that, this game is not without its problems, but I suppose for a game with this magnitude, the game is still worth it!

The updater in this game is awful. I must admit that I did have problems with the updating process. It kept giving me an error message about script not being read etc. However, this happened on my new Packard bell with Vista installed. I didn't have this problem with my previous PC so it makes me wonder where the real problem lies. Although codemasters are always updating the game and making sure bugs are fixed, their customer support is definitely not as well organised as the WoW customer service. They answer all problems very quickly but in the end, it basically seems like they can't explain some of the problems. They do try and help you but when they can't explain it, they really don't make an effort to try. However, I heard lately that their customer service has improved. I'm not sure about this because I haven't had to contact them since the previous problems I've had (those were all resolved) so that means they must be getting something right since I can still play the game without hiccups or problems!

One last thing, the cost of a beautiful middle-earth is high! The graphics in this game are pretty intense which I assume can leave a lot of WoW gamers with a ... vendetta? Definitely. Because WoW's graphics are a lot simpler, more people have access to it and don't have to worry about their PC's not running it. On my previous computer, LOTRO was pretty slow and the PC wasn't a bad one at all. The person who bought that PC from me plays The Witcher at a decent graphics setting so the game definitely hogs lots of RAM. But it is so worth it to upgrade your PC anyway! There are many new games coming out that require better graphics cards etc. and once you see the beauty of this online middle-earth, you won't want to stop. Every time I play the game, I get side-tracked just so I can go run around the country-side looking for random small quests and admiring the landscape. This game is a lot of fun and if you look past its extremely miniscule issues, this game is basically flawless! Don't judge the LOTRO community before you try it. Remember, it's not the game that makes a rotten community, it's the people! This game is highly recommended... just look on the internet and in magazines. Major game reviewers have all raved about this game and Tolkien fans were left in awe! So Codemasters must have gotten something right. This game and WoW will forever be in my heart as the best fantasy games around... but like I said... LOTRO has that little something extra.

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review by: date: 2008-04-25 rating:
Explore Middle Earth!
For Lord of the Rings fans this game is absolute heaven.

The graphics and sound are brilliant and you really feel that you are there in Middle Earth, and there are literally hundreds of quests to do solo or as part of a fellowship, although once you reach level 10 most quests are too difficult to do solo. The graphics are that good that you can quite happily just wander around taking in all the sights: Bree, Rivendell, Weathertop, they are all here.

One thing that puzzles me is that on the back of the box it says that the game will NOT work on system's with integrated graphics cards including laptops. And yet I am running this game on a Toshiba laptop with 2GB memory, a intel 1.6 ghz dual core processor and an INTEGRATED intel x3100 graphics card and the game is running perfectly on quite a high graphics setting!

My only complaint about this game and this is why I have given it a main rating of 4 stars instead of 5 is that it took an absolutely ludicrous 2 and a half hours to install with all the updates and patches that have come out since the Gold edition. Certainly worth the wait though!

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review by: date: 2008-03-23 rating:
Tolkien's world fully explored
I had my initial reservations about this game being a long term Tolkien fan, but am really glad I paid for lifetime subscription now.

The storylines and quests grow in complexity as you level up, but so do the enemy. The maps stay fairly true to the originals and give you a 3rd dimension that allows you to explore.

It is not WOW and does not try to be, but personally I would say it is the best game I have ever purchased, still playing up to 7+ hours a week (would be lots more if I did not have to eat, work and sleep).


review by: ZmeiGorynych date: 2008-02-13 rating:
A dive into the Tolkien world
This game has me totally hooked. The Tolkien world is represented incredibly well - it's really beautiful and the different regions really have a different feel to them: the lightning, background sounds, and landscape work together beautifully to give a distinctive feel eg to the Lone Lands as opposed to, say, the Old Forest. The quests are reasonably varied between grind and more fun/unusual ones. Up to level 10 or so it's OK to play solo, but after that you pretty much have to hook up with others into fellowships, which is easy and even more fun.

Be sure to read the forums and to use the Googlemap of Arda when you're playing though, or you're going to miss a lot of fun corners and gameplay subtleties.

I had trouble submitting my credit card online for some reason, but it went OK over the phone.

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