I personally thought War in the North was great...at least for the first playthrough. I'm a huge fan of hack 'n slash type games, so this was right up my alley. It was really fun to see places and people that were largely overlooked by the movies come to life. I also had a lot of fun running into the more familiar characters as well. The ability to choose different responses to dialogue prompts was a nice touch even if I was a little disappointed that there weren't really any moral ramifications for being snarky or making questionable choices. On the other hand, just being able to make these decisions added another layer of fun. I've played the Baldur's Gate and Champions of Norrath games from the PS2 era, so I kind of knew what to expect gameplay-wise. The thing that really gets me is that I was playing this co-op with another person, and we were super stoked about playing it again even if it was repetitive and we had already done it once. Then, when we started the second playthrough, things just collapsed. My character couldn't land critical hits, his saves would desync from mine, quests would disappear, mounted crossbows didn't work, characters showed up in places they didn't belong. (After playing through the Ettenmoors level, I decided to go back to Bree to give Otto some weapons. When I went there, Aragorn was sitting in the corner, floating above the table, holding an invisible drink and gave me the same dialogue that I had already had with him when we met in Rivendell.) We're still soldiering on, but it is pretty disappointing when the whole point of earning these difficulty increases is to encourage us to play it again, but when we do the game just breaks. In spite of all of the glitches and problems, I'd still say it's worth it for anyone who loves either LotR or action RPGs of this sort. Because of the large fanbase and community outpouring, I'm putting a lot of faith in Snowblind to work out a patch and get everything fixed as efficiently as possible -- quick enough to keep us interested, but not so fast that the patches either don't work or create a whole host of other problems in their own right. Once this is done, this game will be awesome again.