Aspyr Media’s reputation has been a touch wobbly of late, from its dreadful-looking Deus Ex remaster to its abysmally poor Lara Croft outfit DLC, alongside accusations of concerning use of AI, so it’s with a slightly hesitant tone of voice that I bring the otherwise good news that the Embracer Group company is promising to bring a raft of lost Lord of the Rings games back to life. Yesterday the studio shadow-dropped a re-release of 2011’s co-op action-RPG The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, a formerly delisted game that’s now back on sale and patched to work on modern machines. And there’s a promise of more to come.
War in the North was originally developed by Snowblind Studios, the folks behind Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Justice League Heroes, before Warner bought the team and merged it with Monolith. It wasn’t ever the most warmly received game, mostly receiving 6s at the time, and went on to be a commercial flop. But time can heal all sorts of disgruntled wounds, and the new version, subtitled Legacy Edition, is being well-received by Steam users. It’s sitting on 95-percent positive reviews.
The Legacy Edition is not a true remaster, but rather a tweaked version of the original with better graphics options that also adds a few welcome quality-of-life features to the game. There are more save slots, there’s a lock-on feature for combat, better UI information, and there are now ways to upgrade characters during levels. All good news.
Aspyr says in a press release accompanying yesterday’s surprise release that this is the “first The Lord of the Rings title released by Aspyr,” adding, “fans can look forward to even more classic releases by Aspyr from the beloved franchise in the future!” Which rather strongly suggests the studio has done a deal with Warner to dig through its back catalog of Tolkien-licensed releases.
$20 for a 15-year-old game of middling quality seems a bit steep to me, although I imagine this’ll be seeing 75-percent discounts in every Steam sale for the foreseeable future. What I like a lot less is the game being listed as both “developed” and “published” by “Aspyr Media.” Nope, the game was developed by Snowblind, and I’m pretty fed up of this commonplace erasure of the original credit in so many Steam re-releases. Still, if you fancy some LOTR-themed action-RPG antics, there aren’t many other choices around just now.