The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age: Prima Official Game Guide

This strategy guide tells you everything about what you can get, and all of your enemies strengths and weaknesses. I wish that i had bought it sooner, but since i had already beat the game twice before getting this, it only helped me with evil mode.

If you bought the LOTR The Return of the King strategy guide from Prima, the The Third Age strategy guide is nothing like the Return of the King guide. It was still useful and informative.

Prima's Strategy Guide for the Playstation 2 game "Lord of the Rings: The Third Age" is a mixed bag in regards to how helpful it is. For my needs, I found the guide to be quite helpful. To start with, there is quite a bit of information on each character and which of the stats should be improved for each character, and which skills are the most valuable for that character to learn. There are sections of the guide focusing on all of the weapons, armor, and items in the game. There is a bestiary at the end of the guide giving stats on all of the enemies. All of this is nice, but the real reason most people purchase a strategy guide is the full game walkthrough. The walkthrough itself is the part of the guide which may give the most help and cause the most confusion/frustration. What will help the most is that the guide gives a very good run down on what it is that you are supposed to, in what order you should do it (in those instances you have a choice), and what some of the best tactics are to help you succeed. The guide, in text form, gives description of the goals, enemies, and what items are won or found in the area. There are some boss strategies included. This isn't a very complex game so the general strategies the guide gives are really good enough (use crippling attacks or Arrows of Sleep when they work, use powerful attacks) for what the game requires. In this manner the guide was quite helpful and I was able to complete the game with 100% of the tasks/quests completed. The downside of the walkthrough is a lack of clarity and a little bit of inaccuracy. There are maps at the beginning of each chapter with numbers relating to which event is happening at which location. Maps are usually excellent tools for working through a game. The trouble here is that the maps are very vague. Imagine a map of the United States. It's a fairly small map and you know that Minnesota is somewhere to the north and in the center of the country. Suppose there are only a few main roads that you can possibly take to get to Minnesota from Georgia. If the map doesn't identify which road you are on or where exactly you are starting from on the map, you may end up getting to Minnesota but you won't know where exactly you are until you get there. That is pretty much what the maps in the guide are like. Some levels are better, others are worse. I do feel that the text description overcomes the flaws with the maps, but there is no quick glancing at the map to get a grasp of where you are. The other downside is a question of accuracy. The guide will list times where Crippling Attacks (an attack which will delay the turn of an enemy, it is incredibly valuable) are to be used but it turns out that the enemy is really immune to it (and vice versa). This happens more often towards the end of the guide and since the strategies are typically fairly simple this inaccuracy is easily overcome, but it is a little irritating when you waste a crippling a