Guardians of Middle-Earth aims to bring the League of Legends inspired MOBA ( Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) style game to the consoles with a whole bunch of fan favourite characters.

As in these type of games the battles take place over small arenas and the main objective is to win by destroying each others primary tower. You play in teams with other people and you all have control of a particular character or ‘guardian’. Also on your team is a continuous stream of foot soldiers that you use as cannon fodder as you try to destroy the enemies defensive towers.

The main objective is to battle your way down the lanes to the enemies tower!

The map is laid out with your base in one corner, the enemies base in the other, and the lanes connecting the two and both teams battle for control of the lanes as they slowly push towards the bases. As the battles can be quite fierce and evenly match you spend most of your time battling for control of the middle ground.

There are a few different attack types available for you to use as you attack the enemy. Firstly you have the primary attack which you use most of the time for attacking the foot soldiers and then you have 4 special attacks which are more powerful, but they do require cool down time.

At the beginning of each fight your character starts off at level 1 and by defeating footsoliders, guardians, creatures or by destroying towers your character will gain XP and level up allowing you to increase the strength of the special attacks. Another good way to quickly get XP is to fight some neutral characters that hide in the arena, these can be spiders, wargs, trolls… etc.

At certain levels you unlock the ability to upgrade the defence towers and modify the type of ground troups at your disposal. It is essential to keep on top of this as it can make a huge difference in strategy later on. Strategy is definitely important and even though you will fail miserably to begin with you can feel that it will just take some time to learn the strategies before it becomes really rewarding, and don’t worry, it does!

Completing fights earns you money which you can spend on things like new characters. The characters in the game are somewhat different than you might expect and even though the game has the movie licenses it doesn’t really feel like that is fully utilised. There are a few well known characters such as Gandalf, Legolas, Sauron Witch-King, but then there is also a lot of ones only coming about from the books and the Hobbit movie. Anyone who has played Battle for Middle Earth 2: Rise of the Witch-King will recognise quite a few.

Different from in-game levels are ranks. As you rank up you have access to potions and commands to use in battles. The potions can be used to heal and commands can be used to order troups and they act like a powerful attack.

A nice flashback to the Fellowship of the Ring as Galadriel uses a special attack.

Primarily you will be always online fighting other players and working in teams of up to 5 aside. However in the custom match option you can set up a match with purely AI characters if you feel you want some practice but the AI for the guardians is definitely a bit lacking usually resulting in them running in circles doing little to contribute to the fight.

There are definitely some network issues in the form of lag and connection times so you had better be prepared to be patient. If do manage to get started the game does become addictive and you feel the need to keep on fighting to unlock new characters, potions and commands. Also each character has a few character specific objectives to help keep you interested.

After a few minutes of playing the fact that it is Middle-Earth based really becomes forgetful and I feel there is a lot of missed potential considering they had access to such an amazing franchise. For example they don’t even use the official voices and the imitations are somewhat laughable. There is an argument to be made that they are just going for a different art style using the same material but even the arena’s feel rather generic and not using some of the material they could have. However, it is quite well made and the graphics are great for a downloadable game and costs around 1200 Microsoft points for the season pass.

So why would you pay for this when you can play League of Legends for free? Well, Guardians of Middle-Earth has been specifically designed for console play and it does a great job of bringing it to the console. If you aren’t much of a PC gamer and have been looking to get started in the addictive multiplayer arena battles then the Guardians of Middle-Earth is a great starting place.