KEY POINTS:
The long-awaited long-in-the-making LOTR Online (full name: Midway's Lord of the Rings Online: The Shadows of Angmar) is finally out and the big question: can it beat out World of Warcraft?
It's easy to feel over LOTR and a bit apprehensive about an online game that could've been so easily ruined.
Expectations have been high - and the first impressions are that this does have the wow! factor. And if you have ever played WoW, you'll feel at home with only a small learning curve required.
It's a very good looking MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) with the lighting, environment and detail all passing the test. In fact, stunning is the word. Water always a good one to check - is awesome with the ripples looking very authentic and shadows and lighting along with a bunch of post-processing effects are astonishing. It feels like you really are in Middle Earth even though the plot varies a great deal.
The framerate on my PC was a bit of a challenge at times but I was impressed by how well it handled with anti-aliasing (you will need this). There's the inevitable lag but that usually happens as more people join or as your PC gets clogged with more cached textures which you can set a limit to.
This is a world you will want to spend hours in and I kept coming back to it over the last few days when ever I had spare time.
You can play from four races: man, elf, dwarf and hobbit and seven different classes including champion and loremaster.
Lost in the Middle Earth world, your play varies from the ordinary tasks of life to more epic scenarios such as a potential war between the elves and dwarves. AS has been the case with other LOTR games so far, the detail is extraordinary. A sign of an exceptional game is that you actually start to care about the people and what happens to them.
This is a huge game worthy of the books and movies that inspired it. Visually appealing and with a fresh take on the wafting daisy fields and spider hanging, it's likely to have a long life.
MadGamer gives it 9 out of 10.
