So I played “Monster Play” for about 1 hour tonight.  I really have nothing left to say about Lord of the Rings: Online after learning that PVP in this game is consensual.  Monster play is essentially just an instance of pre-created characters that you can upgrade here and there.  Boring button mashing.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Fail.  Now on to my overall review of LoTR:O. 

Graphics:  The graphics here are good, nothing to rant and rave about, but above par at the least.  Very pretty landscapes, ok texturing, nice animations on most objects.  Really no complaints on this front.

Engine:  When I say engine, I mostly mean memory usage, network latency, visual lag, things of this nature.  I was impressed, they make very good use of memory and not once did I ever get disconnected.  Good code, good servers.  A+ here.

Sound: I did like the sound effects, though the human sounds like a fag more times than not when being hit.  The music is fitting to the scenes and the time era.  No complaints here.

Game Play:  It’s your basic button mashing MMO, nothing out of the blue here.  Fight, mash some buttons, loot, sell, get a new quest, repeat.  It got boring, very quickly.  Just like WoW.

PvP: I gave this one its own section for one reason.  The one main argument I see about my reviews are “Its about the story!”… Really? I remember in the books the orcs raping and pillaging villages on a whim just to do so.  Can you do this in LoTR:O?  No, of course not.  You are kept to a fucking instance where the dumbass free people have to attack you!  Tolkien would be spinning circles in his grave right now.  Yes, some people like to play the story of the good guys, but you know what?  The other 50% want to be the bad guys.  Way to fail on an epic scale guys.

In all honesty, I have nothing really left to say.  If you want to read endless stories about the land that Tolkien made, play the game.  If you don’t want any real action, it’s just for you.  You like crafting?  Go for it.  If you are interested in real combat, skill, and interesting battle scenarios… RUN LIKE HELL.

The game couldn’t keep my attention for more than 10 hours…

Fail.