Published 12/04/2024

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (PS2)

Whilst I’ve got far, far too many new games to play (I’m so sorry, Granblue Fantasy Relink), recently I’ve been regaling myself in the nostalgia of the PS2 era, games both new and old to me. And whilst I’ve been having a great time playing titles like Samurai Warriors, seeing where one of my favorite franchises began, the last week I’ve pretty much been consumed by the prototypical Mitch hyperfixation; The Lord of the Rings, in particular, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age and today’s choice of game, The Two Towers, a game that had me in a vice grip like nothing else. Has it aged as well as I hoped? No - it was a product of it’s time, in the sense that it was a decent licensed title in a sea of utter shovelware. But most importantly… is it still fun? When the cards are down, hell yeah it is.

To anyone who knows me semi-well, you’d know that I had a massive Lord of the Rings phase. I credit seeing The Two Towers, late at night at a friends house as kickstarting my deep love of fantasy, cinema in general, and I think my general bisexuality can be traced back to seeing Vigoo Mortenson as Aragorn. Ah, childhood. But one of the linchpins of that hyperfixation was playing The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for the PS2. It was a game that I played almost endlessly, obsessed with it’s vast array of FMVs that felt like I was watching half the movie as it was, and relentlessly replaying it’s best levels. Above all, I want to underline that I had an incredible amount of fun replaying this; it’s something special, albeit aged, and it’ll always be something that holds a very special place in my heart.

Whilst the objectives and stakes of each level may vary - some will tasks you with just making your way through an area, whilst others will impose a pseudo-time limit, or pit you against a near unending tide of foes, sometimes defending a point from destruction - overall, the game is a staged-based hack and slash, with a generally basic set of controls that can be combo’d in to a limited array of combos. Playing as either Aragorn, Legolas, or Gimli, each characters essentially play the same, with major modifiers mostly lying in their health pool, melee damage, and ranged damage, though it’s pretty obvious who’s strong with what - seriously, did you expect Legolas to be the best melee fighter? Either way, you’ll be running about a number of stages, slapping apart to the forces of Suaron and Saruman, getting to the goal and usually fighting a boss, or minibosses, as you near the end. But, as I said, each character’s moveset is relatively the same, and this goes double for the combos - you’ll have knockdowns, shield breakers, and various tiers of auto-kill combos, only locked behind the game’s relatively limited RPG elements. EXP is simply gained by taking foes down, with higher amounts received by chaining together kills, combos, and generally avoiding taking hits, so if you want to get your hands on those more deadly combos, you gotta play smart… unlike me. It’s not the most complicated battle system, but that’s what led me to my biggest revelation with this game.

The number one thing I noticed after my latest, fifteen years on run of The Two Towers was just how goddang short it was. Seriously, I hit credits after only two hours and a half, and that was with an odd death here and there (screw the first Rohan mission), but oddly enough, I didn’t find myself disappointed with how short this game was, or how much transient it felt compared to my childhood. No, because that was when I realized that this is, at it’s heart, a beat’em up. Seriously, all the pieces are here; different characters, who largely play the same but have certain strengths and weaknesses; stage-based gameplay, with a heavy emphasis on changing together moves and kills to get better kill ratings,which most importantly, encourages you to play these short levels again and again to get better and better scores. Coupled with how the game is constantly throwing different styles of levels at you, ranging from more adventure-y standard stages, to wave based, defending the point sections constantly kept me coming back to replay a certain level here or there. Seriously, I could play the Hornburg Courtyard stage over and over again, it’s genuinely one of the best stages in all of gaming. But, for those who are looking for a more one-and-done experience, The Two Towers is a short experience - hell, a few early levels aren’t even playable with other characters, being locked to Isildur in the prologue, and Aragorn on Weathertop - and there’s a select few levels that are frustrating enough that there wasn’t much enthusiasm fro me to run it back. Kind of limits the replayability, at least for me as an adult in 2024 with waaaay too many games to play.

Aragorn is without a doubt the best designed character, and my go-to (again, due to the bisexuality), having a decent balance between strong melee damage and ranged offense, not really struggling with any foes and holding his own against the meatier targets. Legolas and Gimli are still fun to play, don’t get me wrong, but their weaknesses are much more potent then Aragorn’s. For an example, I found Legolas great at taking down weaker foes in quick succession, making him great for earlier stages, but tougher missions against the Uruk-Hai lead to several situations where I was just chain-hit to death. Gimli, on the other hand, can pretty easily stun and cleave through the toughest foes in the game, but when a squad of archers are pinning you down at the same time, it can be a struggle to deal with both them and Uruk-Hai, due to Gimli’s extremely slow ranged options. But, ultimately, they all work well in their own way, especially once you level them up and get a bunch of their skills, and it’ll very much become a case of just finding who you jive with the most.

Sadly, I don’t think the combat has really aged that well, overall. It seems to really swing from one binary to the other - either you’re cleaving through enemies like a hot knife through butter, or you’re just get chain-hit and knocked around like a helpless animal. There was very few times, even with the boss fights, where I felt challenged, but not in a frustrating way - seriously, Sometimes enemies will just block moves randomly, shield foes never seem to smoothly go down to skills, and if you get caught off-guard by a Uruk-hai berserker, you can kiss half your health bar goodbye with how hard these guys hit. Plus, I had a weird issue where half the time I used a combo that auto-killed a certain class of enemy, my character would instantly do the ‘killing strike’ move for no reason, opening me up to way too many attacks that I didn’t deserve. Again, this game is closer to a beat’em up then a traditional hack-and-slash, so it’s not an atrocious issue, but there’s just so many cases where I struggled to find a proper sense of flow, constantly being interrupted by silly shields or hitboxes or whatever. Like I said, sometimes it feels great when that flow actually gets going, but sometimes all it takes is a stray goblin strike to break you out of it. It might just be a skill issue, but it was just my experience.

I also, generally, think the boss fights in this game are pretty bad. Usually it’s just a case of finding the right time to strike them, but they always feel clunky and frustrating at the best of times. A prime example is Lurtz, the Uruk-kai commander at Amon Hen, can only be attacked when his sword gets stuck in a statue, but I had *two* separate deaths as Legolas because his sword just passed through the statues, carving away massive swaths of my health because the sole mechanic didn’t work. Infuriating. The game also heavily overuses Trolls as mini-bosses, which are just tanky buggers that, especially when fighting multiple in tandem, never feel natural to fight and can really mess you up if you screw up the pace of your attacks - I’d rather just deal with more Uruk-kai goons, honestly. It might be more same-y, but it’s a lot more fun.

Funnily enough, despite being entitled The Two Towers, this adaptation also covers the more action packed moments of The Fellowship of the Ring, perhaps to fill in people who didn’t engage with the much more book-accurate, and much more maligned Fellowship of the Ring. This isn’t a bad thing, since the sections - Weathertop, Moria, and Amon Hen - are all great levels. But the meat of the game is Two Towers content - which is still only seven levels, and even then, some stretching of the source material had to be undertaken, mostly in the Rohan section as we have Aragorn and co. saving several villages from Uruk-Hai, but it fits the pace of the game and it serves to fill out the otherwise conflictless Rohan section, Warg fights notwithstanding. Easily my favorite levels in the game are the one-vs-many fights; fighting in Balin’s Tomb, Amon Hen’s struggle against an army of Uruk-hai, and of course, the gigantic melee that caps of fthe game in the Hornburg Courtyard. Just getting to throw yourself into entire crowds of enemies, cutting down Orc and Uruk-Hai alike to try and stem the unending tide. Even with my gripes with the combat at times, the sheer spectacle of many of these stages, on par with the films itself, override any complaints I have at all. Some, of the levels, I must underline. Whilst not every level is a banger, with levels like Fangorn Forest or the second Helm’s Deep being overlong drags, no level is too long as to put me off the game, and after you’ve unlocked them all with one character, you can bounce around to any level with any character, so it’s even less of an issue… though I wouldn’t throw yourself into one of the levels jam-packed with armoured Uruk-Hai with an unlevelled character.

I think much of the acclaim this game received back in the day was due to it’s generally strong audio-visual experience, feeling like a true adaptation, almost alternative to the film itself, and this underlined heavily byt he fact that many of the game’s cutscenes are just FMVs from Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers, with Aragorn narrating his journey to Eowyn. The game actually has very few cutscenes, almost none that progress plot or the narrative, and I think just ripping and editing the FMVs was the way of the developers getting the game out as quickly as possible, and putting the bulk of their focus to the gameplay. Overall, though, the game looks surprisingly good, even two decades on, whilst there isn’t a massive variety in enemy designs, the model’s of the major characters look really nice - as an aside, levelling up your characters will unlock a couple of documentaries about the making of the game, which is a nice little addition and worth checking out. Like with the FMVs, much of the music is directly pulled from the film, which is a delight because, as we all know, Lord of the Rings has one of the best OSTs ever put to film, and just hearing these big tracks swell (in their slightly bit-crunched glory) in the game’s most dramatic moments never got old. Seriously, the total atmosphere in the final Hornburg Courtyard level rivals the film events of Two Towers. Man, I can’t gush enough about it.

Playing through The Two Towers again was a lot of fun - warts and all. I can appreciate it, despite it’s aged gameplay and shockingly brief runtime, as I can look at the game through a new lens and regale myself with the memories of my past. It’s no surprise I was obsessed with this game as a kid, no surprise at all, and I think its worth a play if you’re half the fan of Lord of the Rings I am, or was as a kid. With it’s beat’em up mentalities, incredible set pieces and faithful depiction of both the story and the cast of the film as a whole, The Two Towers might not jive with those used to more modern game design sensibliites. But for those with deep, deep love in their heart for Lord of the Rings, or just a solid action game, I think you’ll find something to love - and if you don’t adore the Hornburg Courtyard, you’re simply beyond hope.