I can’t be sure I’m remembering this right, but I think the penultimate level in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, where you’re holed up in a hilltop ruin outside the Black Gate of Mordor trying to buy Frodo some time, is one of those levels where the waves of enemies will go on forever unless you do something to trigger the next stage.
Right or wrong, that’s how I remember it, and it’s great. Return of the King was one of those games you could more or less break if you played enough of it. I remember unlocking Mithril Arrows – a ridiculous concept if you ask any Tolkein nerd but then, why would you do that? – and they had the added bonus of passing through enemies and making them explode. Arrows that pass through enemies! And make them explode! Cue hours upon hours of Legolas standing at the back of that little ruin, pelting Uruk-hai with magic pink arrows and chuckling to himself – I’d imagine – about how endlessly, stupidly fun it is just to do that over and over again.
Much of Return of the King’s magic lives in that moment, and the various ways in which it’s repeated over the course of the game. There’s a very base, intuitive part of the mind that those types of pseudo-horde-mode battles seem to tap into. The same thing that makes me love bridges in RTS games, because they make for the perfect choke points to put turrets or spearmen or archers and walls in front of. Or the same thing that makes all the ridiculous multi-stage traps you can make in Minecraft so popular. Or the likes of Plants vs Zombies far more compelling than they’ve any right to be. Return of the King was pure hack and slash – pure hack and slash; there’s almost nothing else to it really – and mix that in with the perfect setting in Peter Jackson’s action-y, siege-heavey vision for Middle Earth and its just pure, slightly infantile heaven.