Lord of the Rings in Gaming: Third Age Total War

       As a lover of the RTS genre of video games, perhaps my favorite game series of all time is the Total War franchise (it does make up more than half of my Steam library, after all). For those not familiar with the series, in many ways Total War games are like Civilization, full of constructing buildings, diplomacy with various factions, and turn based army construction. However, what makes the Total War series so amazing is its focus on historical moments of history and real-time battles, launching the player into a battlefield when armies clash, allowing them to lead up to 40 units made up of hundreds of soldiers. Now, how does a typically historical game series (Warhammer being the exception) have to do with the Lord of the Rings? There is a mod for the game Medieval 2:Total War, called Third Age Total War, which converts the original medieval base game into a full campaign map of Middle Earth:

            As you can see from this image, Third Age Total War allows the player to lead a wide variety of factions, from Harad to Rhun, Gondor to Rohan, and of course the best faction of all: the Dwarves of Erebor (not that I have a dwarf bias or anything). While I couldn't figure out how to take in-game screenshots, I did manage to take a few pictures on my phone, but few are of okay quality at best. Thus, to get a sense of the scale the game can achieve, I have attached a link to a battle of Helm's Deep done by a popular YouTuber, albeit more true to the movie than the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T9dH4dDjXQ

          As you can probably tell, this game is quite a lot of fun, especially when trying to while the COVID hours away. As for analyzing the game itself, while some online scripted battles like in the link can really capture the feeling you get from reading the battles in the books, a part of me feels like this game shows the reason why the book was written from the point of view of a small fellowship. Don't get me wrong; the game is an awesome strategy game that allows epic battles on the scale of the books. However, the downside is that it is a strategy game, thus necessitating a much more top-down view of Middle Earth, both literally and figuratively. While the beginning of a campaign can give you the sense of beating back a near-unstoppable tide of evil against all odds, most of the early game is deciding to build mines in Erebor to generate enough income to produce enough units of Dwarven axemen to defeat a neighboring Orc settlement.  Slowly but surely, the game turns into a cold calculation of alliances, nation-building, and tactical victories, which is hardly what the books are about. But at the end of the day, there is something satisfying in your small dwarven army of 1000 facing off against a force of 5000 and somehow winning... or not. However, thank goodness for quicksaves!