Lord of the Rings mobile game asks players to preserve Middle-earth’s history

polygon.com:

In The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, which launched Wednesday for Android and iOS devices, players are tasked with keeping intact the timeline of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most beloved works. That means, generally speaking, recreating major events in turn-based battles, where the good guys prevail.

But not all the time.

“There is, actually, a part in the tutorial when we actually do unlock the ‘Shadow Side’ campaigns, where our narrator, Eärendil, actually speaks to it,” Capital Games’ Nicolas Reinhart, the game director, told Polygon. “But basically, he’s pained — he doesn’t like the fact that you have to go in to make sure that the bad guys win.”

“The bad stuff still needs to happen,” added design director Jay Ambrosini.

But the bad stuff will follow the rest of the good stuff Capital Games has imagined for The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, a “collection RPG” in the mold of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, the very successful Android and iOS title that Capital Games launched with Electronic Arts in 2015. Like Galaxy of Heroes, Heroes of Middle-earth is a free-to-play game that revolves around unlocking, collecting, and deploying some of the most recognizable characters from Tolkien’s canon, as a squad of champions sent back in time to put things right.

“A lot of what we were inspired by, being late ’70s, early ’80s kids, growing up with toys, and playing in the backyard with action figures — it’s a lot of the same thing,” Ambrosini said. “That’s what we’re trying to recreate there. You have a lovingly made figure that you really believe is a representation of Frodo or Strider. And then you’re with your friends, and you’re like, Yeah, what if Sauron was there? A lot of it is sitting and recreating those