Lord Of The Rings Online Review

Game Review

Game Review : Lotro

Middle-Earth is a much busier place since Lord of the Rings Online went free-to-play. Free-to-play games are never completely free, but in LotRO there’s a huge amount of content to enjoy before you’re forced to lay down any cash.

Fetch quests and monster-slaying tasks are interspersed with choreographed story missions. The main addition to the free-toplay version is the item store. Here tomes, mounts, quest packs and the game’s two expansions, Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood, are all available for purchase. 

 

Items are bought using Turbine points, 100 of which cost just over a pound, although they can also be earned as you play. Turbine points have also been seamlessly integrated into the Deeds system, which offers a series of extra tasks in each area that run parallel to the game’s normal quests. 

The attachment of Turbine points to Deeds has only made the game more addictive. Unwrapping the package revealed a cluster of free items. The game’s generosity ran out at around level 20. The rest had to be unlocked by buying a quest pack. These populate areas with hundreds of quests, and add dungeons to new areas, effectively unlocking high level content. 

The Lone Lands pack was cheap enough for me to buy with my hard-earned Turbine points, but later ones cost around £5-6, which can buy you enough content to raise your character by five to ten levels. It is possible to play through the high level areas for the story missions alone, grinding the wildlife to gain levels between each quest, but it’s a miserable alternative, and if you’re invested enough to reach level 20, five or six quid every now and then feels worthwhile. 

If you prefer, you can still pay a monthly subscription to become a VIP player. It also unlocks all of the quest packs, and the game’s player vs player mode, Monster Play, which lets you create a monster at level ten and battle other high level players in the Ettenmoor region.

Your reward: new skills that can be bought using the points earned in Skirmishes, granting your character additional special abilities. Lord of the Rings Online still has shortcomings. Every character in the game is still on the same side, removing any possibility of large scale player vs player battling. The new tiered pricing system gives players more choice.

By. Game Review