Lord of the Rings Video Games, Ranked Worst to Best
J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy book series The Lord of the Rings has long been an inspiration for videogame designers, with the first game adaptation (of The Hobbit) arriving in 1982, to be followed by dozens of additional game adaptations over the next four decades. The arrival of Peter Jackson's film trilogy in the early 2000s only accelerated the game industry's rush to put Middle-earth on consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. And the games are still coming, with two new titles released during the first half of 2023 alone.
Some of those games have been well received by critics and gamers alike, while others were far from precious. In the gallery on this page, we rank every Lord of the Rings video game adaptation (of both the books and the films) released in the modern era of gaming, starting in 2002. The games are ranked from worst to best by their Metascores, which reflect the consensus views of professional game critics.
Note that titles must have at least four reviews from professional critics in order to have a Metascore. (That four-review cutoff means that many mobile-only games, including the recently released The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, are not listed here.) If a game was released on multiple platforms, only the version receiving the highest quantity of critic reviews was eligible for inclusion.
Xbox 360, 2009
also on PlayStation 3, PC, Nintendo DS
LOTR games fall into three rough categories: (1) Those based directly on Tolkien's books; (2) Those inspired by the books (and set in the same world) but featuring a new original story; and (3) Those based on Peter Jackson's film adaptations. The 2009 action game Conquest falls into the last group—though it mainly includes story elements that were cut from the film trilogy—while also borrowing heavily from the gameplay of Star Wars: Battlefront, a series that comes from the same developer, the now-dissolved Pandemic Studios.
Despite upgrading its engine to allow for large-scale battles, enlisting Jackson's effects house Weta Digital to provide digital models, and borrowing the score and some of the actors from the hit films (especially Hugo Weaving ad Elrond), Pandemic could not duplicate the critical success of either its Star Wars games or Jackson's films. Instead, critics complained of a shallow, dull, and poorly executed game that even die-hard LOTR fans would have a hard time enjoying.
“It’s uglier than Gollum and twice as annoying as that whiny Frodo chap. Even brutalising fat hobbitses as Sauron himself can do little to alleviate the feeling that Conquest is a cheap, lazy and regressive game that is the very worst kind of franchise cash-in.” —Telegraph
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