The NPC drones themselves can be upgraded to feature mounted orcs and cave trolls that bash through enemy towers. If you find yourself hard pressed to overcome player-controlled guardians, for instance, you can still hold your own on the scoreboard almost as effectively by focusing your attention on destroying the upgradable enemy towers and soldier spawn points that line each lane. In their favor, the maps provide a good number of secondary goals. Middle-earth provides fertile ground for a multitude of settings ranging from the Shire to Mordor, but the game's uninspired stony pathways and charred foliage don't fully evoke the wonder of Tolkien's universe. It's a pity that the two included maps don't exhibit more aesthetic variations. Guardians of Middle-earth does a fantastic job of reproducing this design, but it brings with it a few innovations of its own, including an intense one-lane map that ditches certain strategic considerations of three-lane maps in favor of exciting tug-of-war battles. It's a design that lets you get powerful quickly, given Guardians' comparatively low cap.
In the case of Guardians, you start each match at level 1 and level in health and power toward a meta-level cap of 14, gaining points for your three existing abilities and one devastating "ultimate" ability beginning at level 5. Destroy your opponent's central tower at his base, and you win the game. The concept is simple in theory: two teams of five players begin on opposite sides of a map, and they advance toward their opponents down three separate lanes with the help of waves of non-player character drones, destroying towers along the way. Guardians of Middle-earth isn't the first MOBA for consoles, but it's the first that has made great strides at reproducing the depth of popular isometric lane-based MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2. Limited and full area-of-effect abilities are the rule in Guardians of Middle-earth. If it weren't for bouts of crippling lag and frequent disconnects, Guardians of Middle-earth would be a must-have game for anyone who enjoys both multiplayer online battle arenas and the Lord of the Rings franchise. What's more, a clear love of Tolkien's universe shines through in its 20 guardians and their associated abilities. For one, it succeeds in adapting the controls and mechanics for consoles, and for another, its timed battles and redesigned upgrades streamline the experience for the sake of fun while sacrificing little of the genre's depth. But thanks to a few significant changes, Guardians manages to stand on its own. If all you saw were screenshots, you could be forgiven for thinking that Guardians of Middle-earth is some kind of timely Hobbit tie-in with League of Legends, so extensively does it borrow from the popular MOBA's playbook.
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