Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle Earth Review: The Game Has Awoken, It’s Heard Its Master’s Call

Freemium/gacha mobile games based on pre-existing franchises aren’t exactly rare. On the contrary, I’d say they’re pretty popular. Putting any personal feelings on the matter aside (I’m going to make it clear right now that we’re not here to discuss that today), using widely known IPs as a base to help jump-start a freemium game has been shown time and time again to put devs at an advantage when compared against those building their own series from the ground-up (generally speaking, anyway). After all, what’s not to like about launching a game with a massive pre-installed fanbase? You’re definitely off to a good start with that! Here’s the thing, though—that’s just the start. You’ve got to make sure that you set the game up in such a way that it entices players to keep coming back. And The Lord of Rings: Heroes of Middle Earth doesn’t exactly excel at that.

Lord of the Rings: if…

At least there’s a story, I guess?

Heroes of Middle Earth’s story walks a very well-trodden path, but a path that’s always exciting to see nonetheless—the “what if” universe. The basic premise of the game is that someone, or something, is going around and messing with all of the important parts of The Lord of The Rings history by possessing critical historical figures and getting them to wreak complete havoc on anything and anyone around them. Fortunately, you—an entity that exists outside of these historical accounts, also exist, and it’s up to you to gather heroes (or villains, when the time calls) in order to push back mysterious invaders and ensure that history remains as it always was.

Like I already mentioned earlier, despite becoming seeing an increase in usage as time goes on, the “what-if” scenario is one that always makes me smile. If handled correctly, it’s an amazing chance to bring parts and characters of a franchise together in new and unique ways—with games like Fire Emblem Heroes and Pokemon Masters being excellent examples of how to do this well. And, to be fair, I’m not even saying that the writing has to be perfect. I don’t expect a mobile gacha game to have dozens of hours of dialogue crammed into it (especially not from day one). But this writing is literally some of the most cyclical, bland stuff that I can remember reading in a game in quite some time.  LOTR is a very old and well-loved series, and I’m sure that most fans want to experience the universe in fun new ways that they haven’t before with a game like this. It really doesn’t feel fair for Heroes of Middle Earth to (seemingly) be putting so little care into the story of what is supposedly the primary single-player portion of the game.

Staging an Attack

Combat is fairly simple, but it works just fine.

As far as the gameplay loops go, Heroes of Middle Earth is both simple and easy to understand. Working similarly to gachas like Raid: Shadow Legends, HoME (huh, that’s kind of a neat acronym, actually) is divided into numerous different stages, each featuring multiple waves of turn-based combat. Players are able to tackle the Light and Shadow storylines through this manner, as well as a third “Guild” storyline wherein players are allowed to take an extra companion that they’ve borrowed from a guildmate. A stamina system is also in place, but the game’s at least nice enough to break it into two parts—one bar for guild-related missions and one bar for non-guild-related missions. Finally, there’s there arena where you can duke it out with other people’s teams, but you’re probably not going to get very far unless you’re really committed to the game (or are a whale). Stamina regeneration, unfortunately, is beyond frustratingly slow (even with the bonus stamina regens they throw in each day), but, other than that, it works just fine.

Players are able to create teams of up to five different characters—all of whom either belong to the “Light” or “Shadow” side. As expected, these characters don’t get along too well and generally won’t cooperate with each other, outside of special areas like Guild quests and PvP. Personally, I think that this is a really neat idea—a lot of gachas run into problems. Light and Shadow characters generally are generally diverse from one another in terms of stats and skillsets, so it’s nice that players are actually forced to go outside of their “party comfort zone” from time to time. Characters are also able to be powered up via equipment and unit promotion (a standard gacha mechanic), but we’ll get back to that in a little bit.

Combat is incredibly straightforward. Once again, harkening back to Raid: Shadow Legends, each character comes equipped with a standard attack, two active specials, and a number of passives—the latter two need to be unlocked via level-up. Additionally, Heroes of Middle Earth also features unique leader abilities and special bonuses that only occur when specific groups of characters (such as Pippin, Frodo, and Merry) are paired together in combat. Again, another great idea from HoME, as it really forces players to strategize regarding who they want to bring in. After all, the strongest units stat-wise may not necessarily be the strongest ones on the field!

Precious… Precious… Resources…

Credit where it’s due, auto-battles ARE a nice feature.

So far, Heroes of Middle Earth has been, well, middling. It’s had some highs, and it’s had some lows. But this is the part where I get real with you—HoME focuses a lot on resource collection, and it basically makes the game unplayable unless you shell out tons of money. You see, there are five major resource types in this game: gold (standard currency), character experience (yes, it’s an actual currency), gems (premium currency), equipment resources (of which there are many), and stamina. It’s understandable that you might not have enough of, say, one or two of them (I mean, who ever has enough premium currency?)—but you never have enough of any of them in this game. And it only gets worse the more you play.

Gold’s really the game’s biggest problem here. Gold is literally required for everything. You need gold for making equipment, leveling characters up, teaching characters skills—heck, you never need gold to promote characters (getting enough points to do so is generally fastest if you use gems). Equipment resources also get rarer—and are rewarded less frequently—as your character’s equipment rank goes up (yes, you have to keep buying them better equipment). The in-game economy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t understand why it’s like this—especially when things like Shin Megami Tensei Dx2‘s Brand System exist, which shows that you don’t have to be mean to your players regarding the in-game equipment system. And, while I have seen slight adjustments made to improve this (your daily rewards, including money, for example), there’s still little that you can do to help yourself if you don’t want to whale yourself out.

Speaking of which, this game tries really hard to get you to spend money. Like, a lot of money. I’m not saying that the game needs to do away with promoting its own in-game shop. Literally, every freemium game does that. It’s part of the business, I get it. But most games—at least those I can remember—are generally a little more tactful with their ads. You maybe get one full-screen ad when you boot up the game, and there might be a few things floating around in the banner. If you want to learn more, you have to go to the shop. Heroes of Middle Earth tends to show me a full-screen ad almost every time I go back to the main menu—and they’re always for things that cost somewhere between $50 – $100. Like, I get it—you want me to cough up some cash. But you can’t just repeatedly scream, “give me money” at me. You need to give me a reason to want to give you money. Currently, my gameplay consists of getting on, closing the ad asking me to spend $100, taking five or so minutes to burn through my energy via auto battles in order to collect resources, and logging off until I can play again in about 8 hours. My party isn’t strong enough to progress (I’m F2P), so I have to do that right now. In its current state, Heroes of Middle Earth is not that fun. I’m not giving money to a game that’s not fun.

No Heroes Here

As it stands, The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle Earth is a frustrating experience of a mobile game, marred by a clunky overemphasis on resource collection, and has a long way to go if it ever wants to live up to Tolkien’s Legacy. I’m not saying that there’s absolutely no hope, because there were a few genuinely good points, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Final Verdict: 2/5

Available on: iOS (Reviewed), Android; Publisher: Electronic Arts; Developer: EA Capital Games; Players: A Lot; Released: May 1o, 2023; ESRB: T for Teen; MSRP: Free

Full disclosure: A The Lord of The Rings: Heroes of Middle Earth was provided to Hey Poor Player by the publisher.