I would describe myself as a gamer. I have purchased and played through nearly every LotR game that has been released since FotR, but I stopped around Aragorn's Quest. I gotta be frank. LotR games are usually mediocre, as a game in their own right. Let's just be honest about it. But there's always an additional factor involved in judging LotR games--the source material. For most gaming franchises, the canon exists within the games. That's how we experience the storylines of Gears of War, Halo, Alan Wake, etc. Sure, there is spin off material, but games come first. LotR games are based on either the films by Peter Jackson or an interpretation of the books. Or at least they should be. After the wave of films was over, I noticed a release of material that had little to do with the image of LotR presented by Jackson, or the Nordic-Anglo-Saxon-Medieval fantasy images presented by Tolkien. Games consisted of generic fantasy elements, with "The Lord of the Rings" slapped on the cover to get a cash-in on a brand name, and often times the results were just plain ugly. I actually quite dislike turn-based games, but I got Third Age because it was a LotR game. When I was done with it, not only did I find myself disliking the game play, but I was also very turned off by the story line. And even while I was bothered by numerous elements in Battle for Middle-earth II, I still bought it because I am an LotR fan. It turned out to not work on my PC (I bought an anthology), so I wasted more money and bought it for my Xbox 360. It wasn't fun. I enjoyed Halo Wars as a console RTS about 1000 times more. Additionally, even though Conquest looked ridiculous, and was a rather poor game besides that, I felt obligated to buy it as an LotR fan. I had to prove I loved LotR, and support LotR in video gaming. People had to see on my gamertag that I was a LotR fan! There is a long line of "bad" LotR games, bad in more than one sense. They betray their source material in the hope of creating a more compelling, original, or playable game within Middle-earth--but because of the often sub-par quality of the games in the end, its extremely hard to justify all the changes.
War in the North does not look like it will continue the trend of mediocrity. It actually looks like a decent game. But with all the characters from the LotR background included, its still hard to see War in the North as anything more than a fantasy game will "Lord of the Rings" slapped on it to get a cash in on a brand name. The creators are taking massive liberties with the source material in this game. There is quite a bit of material that has been left untouched in the ACTUAL LotR story, yet the developers felt the need to tell something original. Eagles saving the Free Peoples' butts seemed to be a pretty rare thing in Tolkien's works. Eowyn being a female in war was a big freaking deal, but they included a female elf warrior. Dwarves pretty much keep to themselves--Gimli cooperating with Legolas was a massive victory for racial relations. Would a ranger work with an elf and a dwarf over fellow rangers, without a specific purpose? Or even more likely, would a ranger not just work alone? Just the existence of the Fellowship of the Ring was a major deal in Middle-earth if you stop and think about it--but now the desire for a diverse group in a fantasy setting has become so necessary its a cliche. In order to make an epic video game, the developers took all the elements from the epic tale of the Lord of the Rings and crammed them into one game, experienced by three people we don't know anything about, who were important enough in Middle-earth history to defeat a major antagonist in the War of the Ring that we also know nothing about. Is it possible? Well, yes. Is it over the top? Goodness, yes. Is it far-reaching? Gosh, yes. There were and are other options for a new LotR video game. But if they wanted to stick with this idea, they really, really could have tweaked it to make it more appealing to LotR fans who appreciate the source material. Going up against Skyrim, Halo CEA, BF3, CoD: MW3, Uncharted 3, Gears 3, and AC:Revelations was a really dumb idea, and making the game more appealing to general audiences, who will preoccupied with the aforementioned games and more, was an extremely dumb decision. I'm also a member of Xbox360Achievements.org, where there are plenty of news posts related to War in the North; response to the game has been quite underwhelming. The general audience is still reeling from the generic Conquest, which was basically catered to them! Maybe if this game looked like more than just a co-op fantasy rpg, and looked more like the greatest LotR console game of all time, the game FANS have been waiting for, I'd get it. Seeing as its not, and money is limited, I'll be passing and getting something else.
I had to rant. I'm sorry. I'm just so sick of seeing one of my favorite films/epic novels continually abused by video game iterations. I just wanted to comment on one more thing...this game has an M for Mature rating. Once again, this was done to appeal to the masses. The films were rated PG-13 and had plenty of violence. But even more striking is the fact that Tolkien is often very restrictive in his descriptions of violence. I view the violence as WitN's attempt to keep up with the trends in video gaming--not to accurately present the violence as Tolkien would have wanted or expected. That's just my take on it, I haven't got a problem with the M-Rating.
One last thing--In my last post I said I was going with BF3 and HaloCEA this fall--but lol, I'm almost certainly actually going to pass on both of those as well. I've been playing a lot of my older games for achievements; I hope to purchase Gears of War 3 soon though.
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and I hate that blasted Agandaur and that lead trio too! 
