The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring

Look at the faces here and nobody resembles Elijah Wood or Ian McKellen. That is the whole story of this one: Vivendi held the rights to Tolkien's novels, not to New Line's films, so Surreal Software had to build Middle-earth from the page while the most famous movie trilogy in a generation was playing down the street. The result is a strange artefact, a licensed game competing against a rival adaptation of the same text with better hair.

Play rotates between Frodo, Aragorn and Gandalf, and the split is more than cosmetic. Frodo cannot fight much of anything, so his chapters lean on sneaking past Black Riders, hiding in shadow and rationing the Ring's invisibility against the attention it draws. Aragorn swings a sword and does the heavy lifting in the Mines. Gandalf works through a small spell list and his staff. Three characters, three loops, and the designers deserve credit for not simply reskinning one combat system three times.

The execution is where it stumbles. Melee is stiff and badly weighted, enemies soak hits without registering them, and the camera has a habit of finding the worst angle in any corridor. Frodo's stealth depends on sightlines the engine communicates poorly, which turns tense sections into trial and error. Backtracking through samey Hobbiton errands early on tests patience before the game gets anywhere interesting.

What it does have is fidelity. Tom Bombadil shows up. The Barrow-downs are a real place you walk through rather than a line cut for pacing. Book readers in 2002 noticed that this version kept material the films discarded, and for a certain kind of fan that counted for a lot more than polished swordplay. The art direction, working without photographic reference, arrives at a softer, more illustrated Middle-earth that has aged better than the character models suggest.

It was reviewed poorly, outsold comfortably by EA's film-licensed games, and largely forgotten once those rights consolidated. Worth revisiting as the road not taken: an adaptation that answered to Tolkien rather than to a marketing calendar, and paid for the privilege in clumsy hands.