Mechanically, it's similar to the board game The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth, but the strengths that only a video game can offer -- real time storytelling and handling the combat mechanics for you -- makes it SO MUCH more fun. I enjoyed the tactical RPG aspects of this way more than I did in LOTR because when you get real time feedback about the different choices you can make, you can see how to build up combos and the way different abilities interact and figure out how to achieve your goal. There's a lot more experimentation and play and how the roles fit together that I didn't experience in LOTR because of the extra barrier of the player having to manage all the mechanics.
