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.
iOS, 2012
An ostensibly free-to-play mobile strategy game based loosely on Peter Jackson's film trilogy, Kingdoms is a slow-moving city builder (with some simplistic battle mechanics thrown in) that required a great deal of time—or real-life currency—to make much progress. It was also, as Pocket Gamer UK pointed out at the time, a re-skin of the Arthurian city builder Kingdoms of Camelot (released just a few months earlier in 2012), which provided yet another reason for critics to deem the game a soulless cash grab. The grabbing worked for a while—The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth grossed nearly $100 million in its first year online—but the game was eventually shut down in 2017.
But before that, an expansion, Desolation of Smaug, launched in 2013. And Kabam also released a web-based PC game, The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age, in 2013, though that game (unreviewed by any of our usual publications) was shuttered less than a year after launch.
“The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth lures you in with the promise of a strategic city builder, but once you’re on the hook, the fun dissipates as you are repeatedly penalized unless you keep a steady stream of costly mithril flowing through your city. I like strategic city-building games, and I like Tolkien’s universe. I don’t like The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth.” —Game Informer
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