When I first heard that War in the North was coming out, I was pumped! The previews looked so much better than previous Lord of the Rings. This new Lord of The Rings had claims of high difficulty, in-depth storyline that follows alongside the actual line and my favorite part: the couch co-op!

LOTR is your standard run of the mill hack ‘n’ slash with talent trees, leveling up and tons of loot. The combat itself however, is where I had the most fun. I’m not saying it’s a highly advanced system, but what do you expect from a hack ‘n’ slash? Mainly your goal in combat (aside from killing the baddies) is to land critical hits (the big yellow arrow of their head) and severe limbs (and yes this game was rated M).

Depending on which character you choose to play as will determine what your special abilities are as well. Your choices are Eradan, the human ranger, Farin a stout Dwarven warrior and the lovely Andriel, the Elven mage. I went with Andriel of course because I typically choose casters in games I plan to play for a while. Of course, I am always chided with “You can’t try to be a shadow priest in everything you play”, but anyway (yes I can!). Unfortunately, playing solo with these guys as your side kicks or even playing co-op with just one as a side kick, I found to be very useless. My fiancé and I played some couch co-op and most of my time was spent reviving Farin. He was pretty much fodder for us to keep the big mobs busy while we picked them off, but he always had highest death count at the end. After 2 days of playing we lovingly started referring to him as “Fartin”.

While the brutality of flying severed limbs and bloody drippings on the ground was nice, it did get very repetitive…very fast. In fact, by the end of the first major mission, you pretty much have seen everything you’ll get to do as far as combat is concerned. In fact, most of the game is just hack ‘n’ slash then conversation in a town…then rinse and repeat. There really wasn’t a lot of substance in the combat.

I did mention couch co-op didn’t I? This was a lot of fun for us to play together on our Xbox 360. My fiancé played as Eradan and with me as Andriel, we plowed through the first through missions together. I chose to go down the path of the healer so that we could stay alive a bit longer and his damage output was pure awesome. The part we enjoyed the most was at the end of certain mission sections the game would display your competitive stats. It was fun to compare things like number of limbs severed, damage amount taken, most valued item found, number of breakables broken, etc.

The only complaints we had on couch co-op mode that we didn’t see in solo player mode was the glitching of the text on the split screen. If you aren’t sure what I mean let me explain. When you walk to an area that lets you advance to a new area it shows a message like ‘Andriel is waiting for other party members” or “Eradan is in inventory” or other messages. These messages stayed on our screen throughout gameplay, and wouldn’t disappear after the task was finished. They would only be replaced by new text messages when something else would happen.

Overall, War in the North isn’t a bad game, it’s a great way to spend a weekend with your guy curled up on the couch, but it’s not something that I think any hard core gamer would feel is a “must have”. If they left the game play and story as is, but fixed the glitches and other things that are broken, it would be an excellent game to play on the days when your “must have” games haven’t been released yet. Will we play again? Yes! Even though I have complaints it really was a lot of fun.