The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

Book 10 introduced two new types of transformation play - playing as a creature other than your main character - to the world. We'll get to Trolls vs Rangers in a minute, but both of these new modes exemplify one thing that LOTRO is really doing well - coming up with fun ideas and implementing them professionally. Almost from the start of the game you can access Critter Play, where you spend a limited period of time as a chicken in a separate chicken MMO... an irrelevant joke, but a sign that the Turbine team is still enjoying making the game. More importantly, as soon as you hit level 10 you get access to Monster Play, which supplies the player-versus-player element of the game. It's here that the Freeps (Free Peoples) fight the Creeps (y'know, cos they're creepy, kooky and awfully ooky).

Essentially, you're given six level-50 monsters, ranging from the weirdly creeping giant spiders spawned by Shelob (our favourite) to Warg Stalkers and three varieties of orc warrior (the new orc Defiler, a much-needed healing class for the monsters, will be in the next patch release). Play is straightforward combat, with a mass of monsters advancing into a mass of high-level Free Peoples (who were obviously absent when the game initially launched), the latter slaughtering the former without much fuss in normal circumstances. There isn't the tactical or strategic element of, say, Planetside or even Savage, and there certainly doesn't feel like there's much structure to the assaults. Indeed, the aim is ostensibly to capture citadels and camps scattered across the Ettenmoors by killing the Nemeses and Arch-Nemeses that control them, but with the lag problems we experienced it's hard to see opponents more than twenty yards away, so that's merely a noble ambition. For killing and capturing you're rewarded mostly with Destiny points that can either be used for permanently upgrading your monster or for buying temporary super-buffs in normal Hero play.

Or for buying playtime as a Troll or Ranger.

The option to play as either one of these juggernauts was introduced in Book 10, but has been disabled for a lot of the time since then because of exploits. And this matters, because it costs a lot to transform into one of these (5000 Destiny points) and you only get to play as them for an hour. The difference, however, is that you've suddenly become an elite boss that has the brains of a human; trolls have massive hit points (about 12 times that of a level 50 character) and can kill most Freeps in a few attacks, whereas rangers have the same abilities but they look like a normal human. Thankfully, each faction can have at most two of these monsters each and, though they make the battles more one-sided, they don't alter the disappointing chaos of Monster Play. Perhaps, as the war progresses, Turbine will allow Monster players to spill out from the Ettenmoors into the larger world, which would alter the focus of the battles and make the various contested areas more threatening and hence interesting to quest in.

One more important thing to mention. LOTRO looks absolutely, astoundingly right. Characters look correct, the world is beautifully crafted and enemies match the best drawings that the Tolkien Legendarium has attracted in sixty years. The Shire looks as good as the movies, Bree (though bigger than we expected) is gloriously rickety, like an old medieval English town, and the build of the Elven and Dwarven towns nail ethereal and indomitable respectively. The player-owned houses, introduced in Book 11, also look damn fine, though they exist in a range of instanced villages located around each races starting areas. Sadly, as empty most of the time so, like player houses in most games since Habbo Hotel, they're a pretty useless and expensive adornment for high-level grinders or show-off Kinships only.

After all the piles of praise we've heaped on it, why does LOTRO still not get the coveted 10/10? Blizzard even like the game so much, it seems to have named their art director after Samwise Gamgee - so why do we have qualms? Firstly, because, despite all its advances, despite the Deeds achievement system, and the believable world Turbine has crafted (where it's very careful to avoid Blizzard's occasional frame-breaking humour, so that you're encouraged to take the plot more seriously), this is still very similar to WOW and its predecessors. And, because of that, it shares the genre's flaws: there's still a lot of needless, tedious running about; the gaps between the excellent story quests stretch wide, no matter how good the scripting of the other quests is; and there are still irritating "kill a billion slugs" quests (some deeds literally ask you to perform an action 1000 times). Monster Play, though promising, isn't quite there, and many of the updates (e.g. faction reputations and collectible armour sets) make the game more like WOW, not less.