The Lord of the Rings: War in the North returns after 15 years: Aspyr makes it more playable, not more modern - Review

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North was released in November 2011, ten days before Skyrim: terrible timing for a linear action RPG built around three characters and co-op. Snowblind Studios, already known for their work on Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath, had chosen a different path from the dominant trend of the era: no open world, but a compact campaign of combat, loot, and complementary roles. In a period when the genre was rapidly shifting towards increasingly vast and free structures, this approach felt almost counter-current. And then, all of a sudden (as if in a fairy tale), in 2019 the game disappeared from digital stores.

Aspyr brings it back on sale today with The Lord of the Rings: War in the North - Legacy Edition, addressing compatibility, interface, lock-on, auto-save, and especially party management. It's not a remake and doesn't try to be: models, animations, mission structure, and much of the code remain from 2011. The useful question is whether these corrections are enough to make a game that already had obvious problems fifteen years ago enjoyable again. The answer is yes, but only to a certain extent.

What Aspyr doesn't touch is the core of the design: it remains a linear and physical action RPG, a product of an era when licensed adventures focused on three protagonists and a closed campaign, with co-op based on party complementarity rather than open structures or live services. This compactness still has its charm today, but it also brings with it the original limitations: uncertain AI, rigid animations, and a combat pace that tends to become repetitive, with frictions that time has made more evident.

The Legacy Edition therefore makes War in the North easier to pick up, but not necessarily as much better as it needs to be. And it is this distinction that defines much of our judgment.

The Parallel War Works Better Than Its Protagonists

War in the North tells what happens far from the Fellowship of the Ring. In the north, Agandaûr gathers forces for Sauron, and to stop him, Eradan, a Dúnedain ranger, Andriel, an Elven sage, and Farin, a Dwarven warrior, are sent. The idea works because Snowblind doesn't try to rewrite the most important events of the saga, but builds a lateral war that crosses Fornost, Rivendell, Mirkwood, and the Lonely Mountain, occasionally encountering Aragorn, Gandalf, and Elrond.

It's when it remains on the sidelines that the game is most convincing. The feeling of fighting while the fate of the Ring is being decided elsewhere gives weight to the missions without forcing the three protagonists to replace the heroes we know. Eradan, Andriel, and Farin, however, never achieve the same strength as the world they traverse: they have clear roles and legible personalities, but rarely develop relationships capable of making them more than just the necessary company for gameplay.

Multiple-choice dialogues add some pauses and still show some interesting details, because the conversation is led by the character currently controlled. It's a simple solution, but in 2011 it still required that dialogues and scenes be constructed with the entire trio in mind. More problematic is the presence of the saga's most famous faces. Meeting Aragorn or Gandalf should strengthen the connection with the main events, yet the absence of cinematic voices today produces a strange distance between models that clearly seek that familiarity and interpretations that cannot complete it (we are talking about voice acting at the level of Medievil but without the comedy of the cited title). War in the North works better when it builds its own small war, instead of directly reminding us of the more famous one.

Quick Swapping Is the Change That Was Truly Needed

The Legacy Edition finally introduces instant swapping between Eradan, Andriel, and Farin during single-player. It's the most important intervention in the package because it truly allows you to leverage the group's complementarity without leaving almost everything to computer-controlled companions. Eradan handles ranged targets, Andriel controls groups and supports the party, Farin withstands pressure in melee: switching between them makes battles more readable and gives the player the control that the original denied them.

The problem is that hot-swap doesn't improve artificial intelligence, it only makes it more manageable. Companions continue to stop within area attacks, sometimes choose nonsensical positions, and in tight spaces can even hinder movement. In certain encounters, we found ourselves changing characters not for a refined tactical choice, but to prevent the AI from compromising the combat.

Quick swapping reduces single-player frustration, but doesn't correct the historical problem that made it inferior to co-op. Equipment also shows the same contradiction: having control of the entire team makes building three complementary characters more interesting, but it means managing three inventories and three progressions through menus that remained tied to their original setup. The interface is cleaner, but group maintenance remains cumbersome. Co-op isn't simply an additional mode: it's still the context where some of the game's problems cease to exist.

Combat Still Has Weight, Until Animations Decide for Us

War in the North retains a physicality that still surprises. Battles are direct and violent, built around a simple system of attacks, dodges, blocks, abilities, and ranged weapons. When an enemy is weakened, they can be finished with an execution that often ends in dismemberment, and the finishing blow still delivers that heavy feeling that distinguished the game from many licensed productions of the same period.

Combat isn't deep, but it has impact. Farin entering a group of Orcs with a two-handed weapon doesn't just seem to subtract numbers from a health bar: enemies recoil, fall, are thrown, and dismembered. The increased fluidity of the Legacy Edition helps, as does the revised lock-on, but it cannot intervene on the most obvious limitation: animations often command more than the player.

Once a long attack or execution is initiated, it's not always possible to interrupt it to block or dodge. If a troll is charging while the character is busy finishing a minor enemy, damage can occur without a real chance to react. This isn't just a habit that has changed in modern action games: it's a concrete problem because arenas are often crowded and require reading multiple threats at the same time.

Hitboxes worsen this rigidity. Some melee hits reach the character even when visual distance would suggest otherwise, while ranged attacks become imprecise when multiple bodies occupy the same space. The new targeting reduces some of the confusion, but doesn't eliminate collisions and animations born around a much older system. The result is combat that's fun when we can impose our rhythm and irritating when the game holds us within an action we can no longer correct. After a few hours, repetitiveness also emerges, and the priorities of encounters become predictable.

Loot Has Remained Stuck in the Past

Beneath the brawler structure lies a more articulated action RPG than expected. Weapons and armor have easy-to-compare stats, there are sets capable of activating bonuses, and each character develops abilities consistent with their role. It's simple, but legible: when we pick up better equipment, we immediately understand what we gain.

However, weapon and armor wear forces you to periodically return to your inventory. In co-op, it's natural, because everyone manages their own hero; in single-player, it becomes another operation to repeat for three characters. The linear structure, on the other hand, has aged better. War in the North alternates combat, exploration, dialogue, and loot without filling every area with side activities or icons. The path is guided, but today this compactness almost seems like an advantage: the game knows where it wants to take us and doesn't pretend to need a hundred hours to do so.

This is probably one of the aspects that time has made more enjoyable. In 2011, a linear campaign might have seemed unambitious next to Skyrim; today, after years of maps built around repeatable content, War in the North simply appears more focused. The problem isn't how long it lasts, but how often during that journey it re-proposes the same type of combat.

Co-op Remains the Only Reason to Pick It Up (If You're Brave Enough)

War in the North was designed around three characters, and playing it in co-op is enough to understand how much this choice still influences the result. With three real people, artificial intelligence disappears from the equation, and the differences between Eradan, Andriel, and Farin become roles that must coexist on the field. The ranger relieves pressure from the rear, the dwarf contains the horde, and the elf supports the group or controls the area.

No particularly elaborate cooperative systems are needed because the division of tasks already does much of the work. Even the repetitiveness weighs less when combat is shared: coordinating against a troll, saving a surrounded companion, or calling Beleram in the middle of a fight retains an immediate pleasure that single-player struggles to maintain.

This is where the Legacy Edition truly finds a reason to exist. Not because it transforms War in the North into something modern, but because it makes a cooperative campaign with a beginning, a development, and an end accessible again, without building seasonal progressions or activities designed to artificially prolong it.

On the technical side, the re-release does what it promises and little more. Sixty frames per second help, but models, facial animations, and geometries remain recognizably tied to the early 2010s. Fornost, Mirkwood, and the dwarven environments still retain a good identity, and the art direction still manages to give Middle-earth a gritty, physical, and directly war-involved tone.

The audio department, however, requires some manual intervention. In our test, the initial balance tended to push the music above the dialogue, making it necessary to lower it in the options to avoid losing some of the voice acting. This is a particularly annoying problem because the performances help overcome the rigidity of the animations and deserve to be heard.

The Legacy Edition accurately describes the philosophy of the entire operation: Aspyr has cleaned up War in the North without rebuilding it. This is enough to bring it to contemporary hardware and make it much less inconvenient to play, but not enough to hide systems and compromises designed fifteen years ago.

The conclusion, therefore, is less romantic than the return of a game that has been unavailable for years might suggest. War in the North was not a forgotten classic, but an imperfect action RPG that had some good ideas and equally evident problems. The parallel campaign retains its charm, the combat still conveys the weight of blows, and the progression system is pleasantly immediate. Quick swapping truly improves single-player, but the AI still requires intervention, overly restrictive animations make some damage more frustrating than deserved, hitboxes are not always reliable, and the succession of encounters quickly becomes predictable.

In co-op, these limitations become much easier to accept, because the game finally regains the rhythm for which it was designed. Alone, hot-swapping prevents the experience from collapsing, but it doesn't transform it. Fifteen years later, we can therefore better understand what War in the North truly was: a rough, simple, and still fun game under the right conditions. Aspyr has restored those conditions; for a true re-evaluation, much more would have been needed.