The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers

It opens with Isildur on the slopes of Mount Doom, which is a strange choice for a game named after the second film and a smart one for a game that wants to teach you its combat before it asks anything of you. That prologue is a tutorial dressed as prophecy. By the time it ends you know the four attack buttons, you know that blocking at the right instant opens an enemy up, and you know that every orc you kill feeds a point counter that buys new moves.

EA Redwood Shores built this around a licence that was still unusual in 2002: actual footage from the Jackson films, cut into the game as connective tissue. Scenes from the extended Fellowship bridge the levels, so the game covers ground the second film skipped. It was a genuine novelty then and it still works, mostly because the transitions are handled with some restraint rather than being dropped in as reward reels.

The fighting is the reason to come back. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli play differently enough to matter — the dwarf is slow and devastating, the elf fragile and quick at range — and the upgrade screen between levels turns the whole thing into a long investment. You replay stages to grind points for the expensive moves. The parry window is tight, the enemies crowd in from offscreen, and the camera is fixed in a way that occasionally hides a troll you very much needed to see. Combat has weight, though. Every hit lands with a thud the sixth generation did not always manage.

Helm's Deep is where it either wins you over or breaks you. It runs long, it layers wave on wave, and it gives you almost nothing in the way of checkpoints, which in 2002 felt epic and today feels like a design philosophy nobody misses. Survive it and the game is nearly done, which says something about how tightly the whole thing is scoped — this is a six-hour action game that expects to be played four times.

It is a tie-in, and it moves like one: short, linear, built to be finished on a rental weekend. But it is also the rare licensed game whose combat was good enough to be worth copying, and its sequel, The Return of the King, is essentially this system with more of everything. Start here and you can hear the later game taking shape.