War in Middle Earth (1988 video game)

War in Middle Earth is a real- time strategy game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer systems, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MS- DOS, Commodore Amiga, Apple IIgs, and Atari ST. It was developed in 1988 and published by the Australian company Melbourne House and is based on the plot of the novel The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.

The game combines scenarios with large Armeekontigenten and smaller character -based game levels. All actions take place simultaneously in the game world, the player can look at all the places on an overview map or locally. Individual characters can be traced in large battles in which they survive or die either - Gandalf alone is to defeat a few hundred orcs in the situation. Smaller fights among 100 participating units are represented at the local level, are larger battles lasting only displayed numerically. At the local level, the characters can collect items and speak with friendly, computer-controlled non-player characters (such as Radagast or Tom Bombadil ).

Press

War in Middle Earth was reviewed in 1989 in the American Journal Dragon, which specializes in Dungeons and Dragons, and related Games. The authors awarded it three out of five stars as a rating. Computer Gaming World published an ambiguous criticism that lifted out that, although the game the events of the original novel faithfully reproducing, there was a lack of a stand-alone strategy and the game always behave very similarly in repeated runs.