The Lord of the Rings: Heroes Reviews

by Meh Pants

Tl;dr: Yet another pay-to-win, low effort game designed to squeeze additional profit by riding the LOTR name. I didn’t have high expectations, but I still came out disappointed. I won’t judge the art style, but I think it could have been done better. The game has several game breaking bugs. You’ll be happy to hear the micro transactions, of course, function just fine. The dialogue of this game is a joke. There are so many redundancies, and characters take crazy events in stride. In act one alone, Arwen is leading an army of orcs and Aragorn is just like “Well, that’s weird.” Like that’s it? That’s the extent of him seeing the love of his life trying to kill him, with orcs no less? Even if that’s ignored, the combat is dull. The graphical effects are pretty sub par for a recent game, and the difficulty curve is so steep that it’s obvious you’re being encouraged to spend money pretty quickly so you can progress. Half of the characters advertised aren’t even available in game yet. All of the interesting named evil characters aren’t available. It’s just full of a few named good characters, some low tier evil ones, and then a lot of random made up characters. The game isn’t a good LOTR game, but honestly, even without that title, in 2023, it’s just not a good game. There are better titles in this genre.

by Tiderion

CG, same developers as SWGOH, so if you’ve played the latter, you’ll have a general idea about how this works. Except, while SWGOH is openly predatory in its monetization, it is as at least fun, we’ll balanced for the most part, and rewarding to progress. Heroes of Middle Earth is none of those things. Granted, the game just released so you have very few characters to choose from, but it is already apparent that the design of the balance and character progression is endemic and is something they designed on purpose to get you to spend more money. I’ll give a concrete example of each:

- Balance: My arena group is nearing 10,000 power and is all the same category of people and clearly designed with synergy in mind. But they’re so underpowered they regularly get beat by hodge podge enemy teams of 8k power and no synergy. This clearly wasn’t tested even a little bit.
- Progression: you will immediately hit a wall in progression by gold. As bad as credits are in SWGOH, HOME is exponentially worse. A single skill level up in a single character can cost an entire days worth of gold earnings, and a single rank up almost a weeks worth. There are virtually no effective ways to gather gold, and your need for it is limitless.

This is a shoddy way to treat such an amazing IP and CH should be ashamed of themselves.

by MagiaDragon

I would recommend passing this game. Super greedy company. Also games runs like crap and characters look bad. Also, they probably charge 100 dollars to level up to 85 and unlock a lot of characters like they do in Star Wars game. Also, if you fall behind you probably not enjoy the game a few years from now as this company don’t care about new players anyway like star wars. At least they could do is give more characters or shrink how long it takes for unlocking for players have a chance to have fun. Everything locked behind characters and high pay wall. This game probably be no different in long run.

Adding on, it appears they wipe your Game Center clean and you have to start over. What appears to happen to my account. Also makes phone hot and shows no download in back ground. Phone never got hot on this game so they doing something wrong.

by J17t

I was greatly looking forward to this game as I love Lord of The Rings and I’ve played similar hero collecting games but this one is a major disappointment to start out. The gold economy in the game is way out of balance with everything costing way too much gold than can be farmed in a day. Once you get heroes to gear 4-5 range you are simply not able to invest any resources into them any further because of the lack of gold. I was greatly looking forward to Elrond joining the game but by requiring elves at 5 stars he will be impossible to get by the vast majority of players during his launch. Overall the game is lacking in content, the art style is holding the game back graphically, and the economy of the game is extremely unbalanced. Hopefully CG will see feedback on the lack of gold in the game and start making fixes or the player pool will dry up fast.

by Forest Trash

If you’re looking for one of the most frustrating game experiences on TheLordoftheRings Store, you’ve found it. With the release of the game, CG hyped up its first major content release in Raids, and it has been universally awful. The first chapter of the Mines of Moria raid is immensely frustrating, with multiple layers of RNG that leave all players in our guild angry, frustrated, and dumping hours into a feature for a game that should only take a fraction of that time daily. In addition, raids are both mandatory and unrewarding. So if your goal with your gaming experience is to be frustrated to the point of turning your phone off and walking away, this is the game for you. Players in discord have been complaining about this experience since raids released a month ago, and CG shows no interest in addressing it, so just be aware that your voice will go completely unheard.

Additional knocks against this game include: underwhelming graphics and UI, excruciatingly slow progression, multiple resource chokeholds in a wildly unbalanced economy, and paid offers that are laughably pitiful. And a literal unending sea of bugs. Seriously, every week feels like there’s something new that will make you need to restart TheLordoftheRings while playing.

2 stars because if you’re playing this game you’re obviously invested in the IP, and because the game has a lot of promise coming from the makers of Galaxy of Heroes. But let’s me honest, this is a really far cry from that.

by RPD23

I am enjoying the game. I play Capital Games’s Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes and enjoy that one much more. This game is similar but not nearly as polished as SWGOH. Levels freeze up halfway through, requiring a full app restart (and don’t get your energy back spent on playing the level), game sometimes just doesn’t load correctly. Also, for some reason TheLordoftheRings overrides your audio on your phone. For if you’re listening to music and you turn on TheLordoftheRings, TheLordoftheRings’s audio overrides the audio of your music, so you can’t do both at the same time, which is really dumb in my opinion. Also, SWGOH does not do that, so not sure why a game from the same devs don’t have similar features like that? Overall, entertaining, but not nearly as clean and functional as some other games in the same genre. Willing to stick it out for a bit but we’ll see.

by Ziggy Zaggy Pro 998877

The gold block is so exhausting, I’m level 36 and I don’t have a single character leveled up past level 31 (your characters can level as high as your overall level) gold is so scarce you can maybe get 30k in one day with multiple refreshes on all the campaigns. However that much gold can barely get you 3 pieces of gear equipped on your characters, the fact that it costs so much gold just to craft and equip an item on your characters is insane. On top of that the game shoves all these pay to win options down your throat while offering at most maybe 20k gold in the pack you just bought. So it’s like “great I bought this pack with all these resources now I can upgrade, wait I have to pay 50k gold just to gear up my character with all this gear I just spent $50 on?!” Which is predatory at best. If the money packs were actually good and worth buying I would just be slightly annoyed by it being pay to win, but it’s literally just pay to sit and wait for gold to farm tomorrow. Needs a rewards overhaul and some adjusting in terms of gateways to the next level. Other than that it’s slightly annoying that all the fan favorite characters aren’t in the game yet but at the same time they are more “legendary” just in name so it makes sense. Only giving it 2 stars instead of 1 because I’m not completely surprised by anything that has gone wrong in the game.

by SteveD1223

Heroes for Middle Earth was a game I had long anticipated coming out and the release is terrible. I played 6 years of Galaxy of Heroes until I got burnt out by what EA had come up with for daily game involvement and now they have greatly underperformed the exact same game only LOTR version. Overall look of the game was never my concern but the lack of characters reacting to hits and style is glaring and distracting. Gameplay is atrocious! Teams and characters are not designed well at all with turn meter a big problem which we can expect mods to be coming sooner rather than later and that just means more money. It’s been weeks and there has hardly been any new content including raids. The longer we wait the more glaring it becomes EA wasn’t ready to launch this game and is hurting everyone who wants to play this game. Even with changes coming in the near future, I would not waste my time or money on this game.

by Shin'nek

I love me a good phone/tablet game but i dont always like to pay a bunch of money to them. I’ve spent money before on games (summoners war for example), so im not against it. This game is just a huge money grab: ads popping up for items/equipment every time you close a window, the pvp aspect you have to either wait 15 min for refresh or pay gem (or crystals whatever you want to call them) to refresh — they don’t come easy in game (1 or 2 hear and there) or pay for them of course. Farming takes about 3 seconds cas you only have so much energy and unless you refresh — you guessed it with gems again — you dont get a ton. Farming for characters is extremely slow due to the fact some levels you can only farm 5 times per 5 hours and get practically nothing. I love LoTR and am willing to spend 5 min a day to play this game (for the dailies) but if you’re looking for a f2p game as a main game you play don’t choose this one — go to summoners war. You will hate your life but at least you’ll still be playing a game for more than 21 min a wk lol

by AngieAngieZz

I really wanted to like the game but I couldn’t. I don’t have the patience for it… the loading is slow, the change from first wave to second wave takes too long, loading dialogue takes too long, clicking things to move forward takes too long. I also don’t understand the heroes thing… like I couldn’t use certain chars even tho I have summon them already. I stopped at lvl 11.. I really can’t continue. Also, I’ve played a lot of games similar in the sense of gearing up. Like you need to farm them, craft them, after you get a full set, it upgrades as whole. This one is so annoying to farm, it auto sets at farm 20 times, but most of the time you get it within the first two times of auto run. So then it means I have to scroll to set it as auto run once, every time I try farming, and it resets per piece of gear. It’s stupid and slow. After you farm the piece, you have to click the end product to craft, making it extra clicking.. redundant actually. It’s frustrating

by DigitalOz

Melee combat can be visually exciting and given that it is now 2023, I had hoped they would make it so. But instead of great animations, it is basic running across the field and whacking what appears to be a defenseless opponent and then running back. Over and over and over again. Even at 3x acceleration, it feels really slow. Then they added multiple stages with a stupid loading screen between each stage! It takes for ever for a battle unless it is done using Auto. If the animations and fighting looked better, it would be could have been awesome. But instead it is basic and dull. I wanted to love this game as a long time LOTR fan, but it is frankly just about as boring as it gets. The graphics are merely OK. The gameplay is standard fare for this genre and exactly like SWGOH. The P2W offers are starting out at $20 - that isn’t cheap. Another cash grab type game but this one just doesn’t have the eye candy or the fun of other options out there. I recommend a hard pass.

by Super Flyswatter

Hate to write a bad review but it needs to be said.

Cons: FORGETTABLE STORY (The Lord of the Rings is known for its unforgettable story yet this game takes it and throws it in the trash), Low-res graphics reminiscent of ps2 era (hope you like some aliasing), gameplay appears to be inspired by the much older Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (which was inspired by the movies and FFX and WAS good) but is somehow nowhere near as good, hardly any status effects that really take advantage of said combat system (sad considering how good The Third Age was at this), all of the healer characters are conveniently difficult to unlock via f2p so they want you to pay $50 to unlock a healer, poor menu navigation, clunky system for upgrading levels for heroes (you have to do it individually each time), no exploration whatsoever. It feels cheap and unfinished yet they still ask for your $$.

Pros: good music (kudos to them), colorful graphics, familiar characters. Makes you feel nostalgic for the old EA Lord of the Rings games (all of which were better than this) when playing it.

Conclusion: don’t spend a dime on this. There’s another Lord of the Rings game currently in TheLordoftheRings store that’s of much better quality. This one needs some serious work/attention.

by Del Nortey

I just got the game and am having a blast. My only big critique is that when you complete a mission for the first time you get 1 premium currency. You need 600 to open the lowest level chest. Why even give us the one if that’s it? I don’t think it needs to be a ton but even 10 would feel a lot more rewarding and like I can save up my gems. Also a lot of the promotions are really expensive for what you get. I want to spend money but I am weary to just because I feel like my premium currency doesn’t add up which makes me weary of longevity of play and I don’t want to sink a ton of money into something like that. Like I said great game overall but it would be nice if they changed that :)

Edit: This game is close to unplayable as I have gone further in. Most new missions I do freeze and steal the energy required to do the mission. I’ve lost premium currency in trying to buy energy then having the same missions freeze several times in a row. It’s so frustrating. I’ve lost hundreds of gems in total because of this. I love LOTR and this game has so much potential but it’s near impossible to play right now.

by Rtsboy

The overall gameplay loop is very similar to other hero-builder games but the LoTR branding is refreshing. Grinding resources seems tuned considerably too far in the greed/grind direction. A few days into the game and you will hit a point where you just can’t get enough resources to make meaningful changes without spending money. The worst offense is that you can’t go through a single screen transition in the game without it blasting you with offers. It doesn’t entice me to make the purchase, it makes me not want to play when I need to close an ad every 30 seconds of navigating TheLordoftheRings . These could be fixed and it could be a fun game, but not really worth the time or annoyance as is, the gameplay just isn’t good enough to justify the grind.

by S. Shatner

Update: The annoying RESTART bugs have all but disappeared. Yay! Unfortunately, there are still far too many bugs for a high profile game that’s been out this long. The biggest bugs are the game often becoming unresponsive during Auto battle and the game getting stick on a Loading screen after claiming the daily rewards. Customer Support tends to be either unresponsive or utterly unhelpful. That said, there is a lot to like about this game and the more time I’ve spent with it the more I’ve learned its nuances. The many bland, indistinct characters are still a problem though.

Original: I expected a LOTR-themed clone of Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes and that’s what it is. RESTART Unfortunately, the character designs are so bland that it’s often difficult to differentiate between the characters. RESTART With a few exceptions it’s all just a bunch of lookalike humans, elves and hobbits with swords, spears and bows vs lookalike orcs & goblins with swords, spears and bows. RESTART Nowhere near the variety and appeal of Star Wars characters. RESTART Worst of all, the game is super buggy. RESTART And, yes, the game constantly crashes and tells you to RESTART RESTART RESTART RESTART RESTART.

by Polish45

Fun game. I am a huge LOTR fan and this game is perfect for someone like me. I don’t mind the main fellowship characters not being in the game yet, as I’m sure they’ll eventually make their way into the roster. The one thing that I think needs serious revision is that GOLD is such a scarce material to obtain yet you need it to upgrade everything. Either make it cost less to equip higher level gear or remove the cost to equip gear entirely as you already are spending all of your time and energy on acquiring the gear in the first place. I’m guessing another place to acquire lots of gold will be in the raids but without having that area yet, Im always stuck on almost zero gold after one upgrade. It is a good game but definitely new. I hope the devs will look how the game operates and see how hard it is to even keep your heroes leveled up and geared up with such a lack of gold at this point in the game.

by Mihaal87

Game characters often default to their model stances (arms and legs spread). Mostly goblins.
As we reach higher levels, the dailies are nothing more than crumbs.
A new bug with last update allows a player to select more auto-attempts than is allowed (Hard limit is up to 5 but is allowing the count to go to 20 accompanying an error message).
Also, the chat censoring is a joke. Some character names and conjunctions aren’t usable.
I also believe the energy system is miscalculated. Ads would be welcome to watch for some replenished energies to allow for longer playtime.
Requiring 5 star elves to get Elrond is pretty cruel. Hardly anyone has leveled their elves because they are weak. Now we need them at 5 stars to get Elrond…
Shadow and Light should have separate energy types. It’s a bit too slow of a grind. We want to play… let us play!
The primary issue is that fans want to play this game the way they want to with their own preferred characters, but the grind is slow and they are required to level characters they don’t want to level. There needs to be more gaming areas the way Galaxy of Heroes does. I want to spend at least half an hour playing, instead, 5 minutes in and I have to wait hours before I can properly play again.

by Mtblue44

I am giving it three stars because it is new. Everyone talks about the gold barrier and it is true. You basically can’t progress after 3 to 4 days of playing. It does make it pretty quick to do daily updates but it is just a wait and grind more gold. Gold needs to be easier to get. The grind should be something else like the gotcha feature. They made it easy to get character shards in game if you want to grind out certain characters that are available as you progress. Mostly unknown or little known characters. I really like the racial synergy that allows you to build same race teams that make your team stronger. Great concept. They help each other in each battle if you have more racial synergy points. It is a expensive pay to win type gotcha. On par with similar costs to Raid shadow legends. There are lower cost ones out there. The story line is actually pretty bad and really doesn’t track well. Plus it seems poorly thought out and it only partially fits the books. I like that you can play shadow or light timelines. Too bad they didn’t do that in Lotro online.
Overall a three star for some good game mechanics and being able to grind fast and not have long grinds. Poor storyline and gold barrier seem to be a real issue.

by ShadeOfSilentFire

If you’ve ever played a hero collector game before, you already know exactly how this game works. It’s just beginning, so you have a chance to keep up with everyone for now, but there isn’t exactly much to do either. There’s only so many characters, and not to many of them are recognizable unless you’re deep in the lore.

My main gripe is there just isn’t enough content right now. Apparently there’s some sort of legendary event in the works and a raid in development, but aside from that, the only game modes are the arena and the campaign. Not a lot going on right now.

Capital Games, if you are reading these reviews for whatever reason, you’ve got to get some content out there; don’t hoard all of your characters for legendary events, you’ve got to start dropping them as soon as you can, because in another 2 weeks, the game is going to get very boring, very quickly.

by MusiqMysfit

The gold issue needs to be addressed ASAP. I know the devs are highly aware of the difficulty for players to accumulate gold, and I hope they’re actively working on it, because it’s getting to the point where the game is unplayable. I’ve spent $300 on in-game stuff because I believed in the game and the devs, but I can’t afford to continue to spend more. Aside from the gold problem, there are some other issues that need to be tweaked, like why can’t I view my arena defenses? An even bigger issue is “The Gardener’s Journey.” One you complete tier 1 and unlock Sam Gamgee, you need to have 4 Road to Rivendell characters at 4 stars, which is near impossible to achieve if you don’t spend actual money. And you’re still accruing “Sam campaign energy” that you can’t do anything about. And Arwen, how am I supposed to get her to 5 stars if I can’t get her shards anywhere BUT the marquee? (Correction, you can spend lots real money to open her special marquee chests at the chance of getting shards) Please fix the problems. There are some other bugs, but they don’t make the game unplayable.

by 215villian610

This game has so much potential however the gold and experience bottleneck is a major concern. Every update leads to another bug. The game is almost pay to play and I don’t mind spending money here and there to support it however with the last update I am no longer getting offers. I did all the steps that were listed on the website than created a case explaining the issue. They responded by telling me to do the steps listed and we’re gonna cancel the case. I had to reopen the case explaining again I did the steps and want to spend money but am not receiving any offers from the store except for Arwen and Alladan. I thought the company is in the business to make money. I posted on discord and on the twitter page and am not receiving help. I just started to play the new Avatar game which has so much more to do. I’ll spend my money on Avatar or will save it.

by Kitae527

It’s always fun to play a game that brings nostalgic memory based on one of the most popular film.

For a game that just launched, it is a very enjoyable game and it has a robust features that enables players to have fun with one significant issue.

The economy in the game is so unbalanced where gold is hard to come by. It is easier to level up than accumulating gold to level up character that eventually, collection of heroes become so unbalanced when it comes to leveling up or upgrading them.

Either each quests needs to give a significant increase in the gold earned or have a separate daily quest to increase the gold input would benefit the infant stage of this game.

For example, the Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes rewards players with a weekly event where players can be rewarded up to 5 million credits that balances the player’s credit/gold input to output.

Once again, this game has ton of potential but what it needs now is the adjustment to the economy ASAP before players start losing interests due to lacking gold rewards or earning opportunity to develop their teams.

by Darth Reyien

This game, like SWGOH, has so much potential. I mean come on, who could screw up Star Wars or Tolkien lore? Enter Capital Games. Other than Activision, I can’t think of a company that hates/neglects/abuses its player base more. I will focus just on this game now. First and foremost, the game crashes nonstop. I have played on a brand new iPad, brand new iPhone 13, and iPhone XR. Same crashes. No difference across devices. There is nothing like losing arena tickets because of a game crash (and I am in gold ranking so I do care about my tickets). How about getting almost through a grueling raid just for the game to crash and have to start over? Speaking of raids, that’s essentially the only game content. Arena and a single boring raid. Want to make your characters better? Better plan on buying lots of gold with real money because they don’t give crap for gold in game. Oh yeah, you guessed it, gold is the driving force behind all upgrades in the game. I never thought I would say this about Lord of the Rings, but pass over this one until they do a complete overhaul (never gonna happen).

by Kilplyztym

this game has so much potential, but the lack of technical support is staggering. There are glitches all over this game, there always have been, but you expect them to smooth out over time, which has not been the case with this game. The raid system for the mines of Moria has been terrible. We’ve lost thousands of keys initiating battles that no one was allowed to play. we’re finally able to play in the current raid, and it is so glitchy that it is barely playable. We were told characters that would be used for this particular raid, that’s not actually the case, doesn’t really matter who you use, according to the new set up, and honestly, I don’t even know if it’s how it’s going to work or if it’s just another of the countless glitches that have plagued this game.

I’ve been playing electronics arts games since 1987, how about putting some effort into this title, so it doesn’t sour what has always been a solid relationship, i would hate to think modern ea titles are no longer expected to be excellent.

by Daguy55667

So I’ll be the first to admit after reading several reviews and before I made this one. I’m currently lv 50 in game and we just finished our first legendary event. I am also a free to play player and can say the gold and exp issues are true just not as much as other players are talking about them.

The game is currently designed for you to build up 1 light/shadow team. Probably once they hit 60 start building a secondary light/shadow team. Obviously max lv will go up and so will gear tier items in the future but for now enjoy the simpler part of the game. With that said all my light/shadow characters I’m using are 45-50. I just think some people are trying to upgrade everyone from the beginning and it’s hurting valuable resources.

Raids are potentially around the corner, but for now the game is mostly lacking content/characters but it is new and will be updating as it goes along.

Yes pay to play players will get further faster but as the game releases these characters those free to play will eventually have the same character at the same gear tier ability tier and star, so just enjoy your own play style.

by Eddymiboi

So far the only gripe I have about the game now that I’ve played it a decent amount is whenever and I mean this could happen whenever is that it will freeze up or be like stuck or stalled out at any moment wether I’m loading something or playing a battle when I’m playing a battle I’ll beat all the enemies at a specific stage then my guys will just be standing there endlessly not progressing to the next stage and I have completely restart TheLordoftheRings and do it all over again just for it to do the same thing 5 times out of 10 and the same problem will happen sometimes as well when it brings up the loading ring symbol it will just be stuck on that and I have do the same thing close it and re open TheLordoftheRings to hopefully get pass that but sometimes it will do right all over again other then that I love it but I’m bias cause I love Lord of the Rings

by The Man Who Helps

I am level 23 for reference and absolutely just sweating out this game, I like it but it is looking almost an exact copy as Star Wars heroes because of the campaign battles there are only 3 and are all exactly like cantina battles and light side and dark battles, if you look at marvel strike force you use different characters, different teams and there are so many campaigns, but this seems to be not going to happen. This game has potential and literally game out 2 days ago and I want to catch one of the devs eyes and let them know that even one different campaign that is different from Star Wars heroes will make the difference and many people would love this game just that much more.

by Satisfied Clashed

I feel bad only giving this a four star review but I’ll explain.

Good first:
This is a really fun game. I feel like the developers learned a lot with SWGOH and came out with a solid starting lineup of heroes with basic synergies that leaves plenty of space for them to build our factions. The unlock farming is relatively easy and less frustrating than other games and the high shard count for greater levels means you can’t maximize every toon in a week. Feels pretty balanced so far.

The not so good:
It’s a new game. There aren’t a lot of game modes and there’s almost no point to guilds right now. This will hopefully get better in the near future. Similarly, there aren’t a ton of toons to unlock.

The last thing, and this is the reason for the 4 stars, is that the game bugs up and kicks you out so frequently it can feel unplayable at times. I’m not sure if this is a server issue or what, but they need to fix it if they want this to be a long term success.

TLDR:
It’s still new and it’s buggy, but I like it and I’m excited for the future!

by Corey W

I understand the game is still somewhat new but it has the potential to draw a massive crowd if things are done correctly.

Some issues are…

Currently, gold is way too hard to obtain without spending tons of money. I don’t want gold requirements to be nerfed severely but it’s incredibly expensive right now.

Some of the best Hero shards cannot be obtained unless you spend a buttload of gems (aka real money)

The game needs more content that’s F2P or somewhat. You have your light and shadow campaign that lasts you a month maybe if F2P. Guild missions that end a bit sooner usually. After that you can only play one arena (pvp) game every 15 min with a max of 5 per 24 hours unless you spend gems. After that you get to do a guild Raid usually once per week or so that lasts 24 hours per stage (most guilds will clear maybe chapter 1 on average)
Besides that there is nothing else to do.

The game itself, mechanics, characters, gameplay, etc… is incredible so it 100% has the ability to be a big time hit but it really needs more content to play. Hopefully in time!

I definitely recommend playing it though even if you don’t do much besides the F2P stuff. That way you’ll have a head start for when the game has more playable content and game modes.

by Ashmash278

This game is really good, it’s like Disney sorcerer or Raid, but it’s better. I’m a long time fan of Lord of the rings, every since I was a kid, but there aren’t that many Lord of the rings games out there, and I think that’s a big mistake. Lord of the rings is on of the best franchises ever and I’m glad it’s growing decades after its first creation from the book. Thank you for building on to this well know and loved franchise!
Now I have one problem, but I am forgiving.
Every time a goblin character goes to run somewhere or do a basic attack the animation for it doesn’t work. But I know that this game is new and I fully believe that you will fix it.