Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is perhaps the worst game I have ever played on stream. LotR:TA is a turn-based RPG, which takes heavy, HEAVY cues from Final Fantasy X, one of the best JRPGs ever made. It falls on its face with nearly every aspect of its game design, leaving no reason for it to be played, whether you're a RPG enjoyer or a Tolkein fan. Let's start with the gameplay, the meat and potatoes of what you'll be doing, essentially there are two methods of play, the overworld, where you navigate a largely linear area, picking up items, changing your equipment, leveling up your characters and getting into fights. Which leads into the second gameplay variation, combat. It plays out much like you would assume, on your turns you chose your actions, attack, spells, items or switching your active party members. While all this seems fine enough, the execution of each individual part takes what would've been a mid licensed RPG, with not much to write home about, to a crass homunculus of the RPG genre. Theres so many issues that it makes it very difficult to even start discussing them, so I will start with a very simple concept, recovering HP, there are a few ways of recovering HP in LotR:TA, Skills that heal, items, leveling up and interacting with a save point. All of this is standard issue RPG fare, where the game stumbles is healing on the overworld. You cannot heal on the overworld using skills, you can only recover using items or a save point if you are near one. Which brings us to another issue, healing items. In most RPGs if you run out of healing options, no biggie you can just pop back to a town to restock. This is not an option in LotR:TA, as there is no currency in the game, there are also no towns. However, there is an option for obtaining more items, you can learn a skill that allows you craft more healing items if it is used in combat, how ever this leads to another issue. Combat. More specifically how encounters are designed, this game does not have random encounters, normally this would be something to be praised, however their solution is awful. Instead of a traditional encounter every X amount of steps it has set encounters within certain areas on the map, which are exhausted after you complete them. This means that you can do every encounter in an area, and will probably do so each time. This design choice means you cannot grind levels, ability points (to learn new abilities) or crafted items. Meaning that theoretically you could run out of resources and soft lock yourself. And all of that is just scraping the surface level, not even touching on turns where two enemies take eight turns, lacking of a respect option for stats and much much more. On to the story though, it's not much to talk about, its hard to follow at the best of times and inane at the worst. It follows a Gondorian who was struck down by a ringwraith and was revived by an elf, they together follow after the Fellowship, through each area from the movie meeting new allies a long the way. The story is incredibly unclear about what you're supposed to be doing other than "just follow the fellowship", I do think this story is the fault of the licensing agreement that EA had, which only allows them to work with things depicted in the Peter Jackson films. In addition to cutscenes that don't communicate much, there are also "Epic Scenes" which are recut scenes from the movies with narration dubbed over them, mostly from Gandalf. There are 109 of these scenes, which range from not really adding anything to massive story revelations to straight up telling lies about in game lore. Speaking of, if you're a bit of a lore hound, this game will probably do massive psychic damage to you, it varies from small inconsequential things like the amount of trolls in Moria, to your party fighting the Balrog or killing all 8 ringwraiths post-witch king death (which they also helped with). As for visuals, theres not much here, I suspect that this game largely reuses models from EA's previous LotR games, which is not a bad thing. Its a 6th gen game seeking an at least semi-realistic visual style, which unfortunately hasn't aged the best. The worst thing I have to say is that many of the characters mouths are actively broken when they're moving or screaming, as well as the battle UI looking very very rushed. Lastly the Soundtrack, it mostly consists of tracks from the films soundtrack, and if I said anything negative about Howard Shore's work I would be drawn and quartered and then crucified, as I would deserve. However I feel like the over usage of it really cheapens the impact of the music. Overall this game is one of the worst games I have ever played, there is absolutely no reason any person should give the game the time of day.