I have a confession to make. When War in the North first launched back in 2011, I was neck-deep in something else and completely let it slip past me. So when Aspyr shadow-dropped this Legacy Edition onto Steam with almost no warning, I went in with fresh eyes and zero nostalgia goggles. What I found was a game that’s rough around the edges in all the ways I remember games being rough fifteen years ago, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. This is comfort food. It’s Lord of the Rings by way of Golden Axe, and I’ve been having a ridiculous amount of fun with it.
A war beside the war
Here’s the pitch that immediately grabbed me. While Frodo and Sam are trudging toward Mount Doom in the story we all know by heart, a completely different fight is unfolding in the North. A Black Númenórean named Agandaûr, a servant of Sauron, has gathered an enormous army in the ruins of Fornost, and someone has to stop him. That someone is a new fellowship of three: Eradan, a Dúnedain Ranger who fights with bow and blade; Andriel, an Elven Loremaster who heals and slings area-of-effect magic; and Farin, a Dwarven Champion who tanks hits and hits back harder.
What I’ve always loved about Tolkien’s world is that it’s absolutely stuffed with side characters, branching stories, and battles happening just off the edge of the page. The films and books showed us glimpses. War in the North lets me actually play through one of those untold threads, and it does so while staying believable within the lore. Along the way I’ve bumped into Aragorn, Gandalf, and Elrond, and travelled through Rivendell, Lórien, Mirkwood, and toward the Lonely Mountain. For a fan, that parallel-story hook is pure catnip, and the cutscenes genuinely got me invested.
Let me be clear about what this is
I want to set expectations honestly, because it matters. This is not a ground-up remake or a lavish remaster. The graphics have been cleaned up a bit, but it still fundamentally looks and plays like an early-2010s console game. It’s a fresh coat of the same paint, and here’s the thing: I’m not remotely upset about that. Booting this up dropped me straight back into the PlayStation-era headspace where my love of gaming started. The vintage UI has that endearing clunkiness, the combat is basic beat-em-up fare, and all of it is completely manageable and easy to follow.
The combat surprised me by how satisfying it is despite its simplicity. You hack, you slash, you dodge, you pop abilities, and there’s a genuine loot loop underneath it all that had me spending nearly as much time in menus comparing gear and sharing it between characters as I did actually fighting orcs. Each hero has three skill trees, and you customize your build by allocating points to suit your playstyle. You can even tweak your character’s appearance early on at the Prancing Pony, which is a nice touch.
One thing worth knowing going in: the game wants you to play it multiple times. The enemy is always scaled one difficulty above you, everything carries over between playthroughs, and Heroic and Legendary difficulties are locked until you clear Normal. If you skip Easy entirely, you’re leaving a big chunk of skill points on the table that you’ll sorely miss at the top difficulty. It’s an old-school progression structure, and I respect it, though I’ll admit not being able to jump straight to higher difficulties on a first run is mildly annoying.
What the Legacy Edition actually fixes
Credit where it’s due: this edition genuinely improves on the original in ways that matter. The old game infamously had a single shared inventory, and now each character has their own, which gives you far more room to store and share items. Being able to hot-swap between the three heroes on the fly for upgrading, repairs, and swapping gear makes the whole experience dramatically more fluid. Each character carries their own coin and buys their own potions, and they’ll use them in battle on their own. Split-screen co-op, controller support, and various technical fixes round it out. These aren’t flashy additions, but they smooth out real friction points from 2011.
Playing solo on Normal, nothing has felt overtly punishing to me, and it’s run beautifully across every device I’ve tried, from PC to handheld.
The multiplayer problem I can’t ignore
And now the part that stops me from handing this an unreserved rave. This is, at its heart, an amazing co-op game. It’s possibly one of the best fighty co-op experiences of its era, and the whole appeal is diving into games with friends or randoms, showing off your customized hero with your own gear.
Except right now, the online multiplayer is a mess. If you join someone else’s game, you’re forced to play as their characters, and when you leave you keep none of your earned XP or gear. The joy of hopping into random games to help people out with your own leveled-up character is just gone. Worse, there are widespread save issues: in many setups only the host retains a proper save, and the other two players get hit with an “unable to save” message. There are community workarounds, involving manually passing save files around through Discord and loading into vendors to force a local save, but honestly, I shouldn’t have to perform a ritual to play a co-op game with my friends. When I did get a clean online session going and made sure to end in a camp hub like Bree, progression saved fine, so it’s clearly fixable. It just isn’t fixed yet, and for a game this co-op-focused, that’s a real black mark.
The AI companions in solo play also deserve a grumble. Left to their own devices, they can wander into danger and go down, leaving you to solo hordes while trying to revive lemmings. It’s doable, but it can get frustrating in the early going before your build comes online.
Is War in the North Legacy Edition worth playing?
For me, absolutely. At its introductory price this is one of the easiest recommendations I can make to a Lord of the Rings fan who also happens to love old-school action RPGs. The parallel-to-the-films story is genuinely engaging, the loot-and-skill loop is moreish, the character swapping and per-character inventories make this the definitive version of the game, and that nostalgic mid-2010s clunk is a feature, not a bug, if you’re wired like me. I keep thinking about how I missed this the first time and feeling weirdly lucky to be discovering it now.
The caveat is the multiplayer, and it’s a significant one. If your entire reason for buying is to jump into online co-op with friends or randoms and keep your own progression, hold off until Aspyr patches the save and character-forcing issues, because right now that experience is broken. Solo and local split-screen are the safe bets today. But if Aspyr sorts out the online side, and I really hope they do, this becomes a no-brainer. And selfishly, after seeing what they’ve done here, I’m now desperately hoping they remaster the rest of the Middle-earth catalogue too.
