
It traces the creation of Middle-earth from its very beginnings to after the end of The Lord of the Rings, although it’s mostly concerned with the First Age, when the Elves fought the dark Valar Morgoth, Sauron’s boss, over sacred jewels called Silmarils. Here are all the most pertinent Lord of the Rings to read if you want the full story, and the order to read them in: So if you want to dive into the deep depths of Middle-earth, where should you look? What resources should you dig up? We’ve made a little reading list for you. And now that Amazon is adapting a chunk of it in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, it’s worth going over. Tolkien, but there’s a lot of story that happens before that. Most of us know the titular trilogy by J.R.R. (That four-review cutoff means that many mobile-only games, including the recently released The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, are not listed here.) If a game was released on multiple platforms, only the version receiving the highest quantity of critic reviews was eligible for inclusion.There are few mythologies more complex and detailed than The Lord of the Rings. Note that titles must have at least four reviews from professional critics in order to have a Metascore. The games are ranked from worst to best by their Metascores, which reflect the consensus views of professional game critics. In the gallery on this page, we rank every Lord of the Rings video game adaptation (of both the books and the films) released in the modern era of gaming, starting in 2002. Some of those games have been well received by critics and gamers alike, while others were far from precious. And the games are still coming, with two new titles released during the first half of 2023 alone. The arrival of Peter Jackson's film trilogy in the early 2000s only accelerated the game industry's rush to put Middle-earth on consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. Tolkien's fantasy book series The Lord of the Rings has long been an inspiration for videogame designers, with the first game adaptation (of The Hobbit) arriving in 1982, to be followed by dozens of additional game adaptations over the next four decades.
