The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II

"A boon to the Lord of the Rings trilogy."

Lord of the Rings needed a good RTS before Battle for Middle Earth came out. Then people were satisfied when BFME came out. And now there's a new game. Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II. There are many aspects of the game to be considered when reviewing:

Graphics: The graphics, if your PC can handle it, are certainly nearly next-gen. I mean, for an RTS, they're simply phenomenal. Even on some of the lowest settings, the game has the best RTS graphics I've ever seen.
[10/10]

Game play: (11/10) Where do I start!? This is where the game truly shines. There are six factions, and, unlike many RTSs, they are very, very different. You've got the Men (Who are all-around types), the Elves (Who specialize in arching), the Dwarfs (Who specialize in mechanics), the Goblins (Who specialize in massing powerful units), Isengard (Which specializes in siege equipment and powerful infantry), and Mordor (Which has Mordor stuff like Fellbeasts, etc.). Resources? There's just one resource. It's not like Age of Empires where there's 4 friggin' resources and you have to get your workers to mine ALL of them. There's one resource, and the ways that you get it are: A. Buildings that get it automatically according to the terrain. B. Buildings that recruit resource collectors. C. An ability called Scavenger that gives you resources when ever you get a kill. D. There are a few methods of killing your own units for resources. As for the workers, they just build the resource acquisition buildings, then can move on to build other buildings. They don't collect resources themselves, which I love. I love it. I LOVE IT. Another way the game shines is the Create-A-Hero system. You make a hero, either a Captain of Gondor, an elf, a dwarf, a wizard, a servant of Sauron, or a Man of the East. Once you choose one of these classes, you choose the subclass, the outfit, the weaponry, you are given a set amount of points to spend on stats, etc., but you can choose what abilities you would like to assign the character. Overall, the Create-A-Hero system doesn't exactly abound in variance, but it does shine in that you are able to create a hero to use in your skirmish games, and you can make celebrities. For example, I made a Haradrim named Ted Nugent (The Motorcity Madman rock star, for you non-Nuge fans) and gave him a bunch of wild abilities, like climbing walls. Also, the scale of the amount of units is reminiscent of true Lord of the Rings, where nearly all units come in battallions of at least 10, so that you can have large scale battles consisting of hundreds, sometimes thousands of units in just a few minutes. And the ability acquisition method, like the ones that don't use certain units to cast, just are overall abilities, is very fun. You get points according to how many units you kill. As you get the less expensive abilites, like the ones that let you see a certain place in fog of war, let you get more powerful and expensive ones, like abilites that enable you to summon things like the Balrog and the Watcher in the Water.

Sound: (10/10) Perfect sound. There isn't much to really ask for in terms of sound, but I do like it when you are commanding Sauron and click on him and he goes, like, "whraaahhh..." in some Satanically evil voice... lol

Campaign: (9/10) The campaign is actually disappointingly short, but the scale of battles on it, I believe, more than make up for it. Also, there are no alternate paths on the campaign like there are in BFME1, just one storyline. But now there is a storyline for both the Good and Evil sides, so that gives the campaign a little more longevity.

Longevity: (10/10) The longevity, as is with any RTS, is phenomenally long. You can play and play and almost never get bored of the game, given that you appreciate the RTS genre. There are so many different options that you have in terms of game play, that they almost never exhaust. Not to mention the War of the Ring mode, which is like the board game of Risk in that you move units, there are turns, etc., and when your units collide with the enemy's a miniature RTS game starts.

AI: (8/10) The AI, I think, definitely has its ups and downs. On the ups, there are such difficult AIs that not even a very experienced RTS player can beat, but there are such easy AIs that even an infant with down-syndrome can beat. On the downs, the AI seems to be unaware that its units are being butchered, oftentimes, and does not bother to make them attack back. For example, I have a battalion of archers, whilst my enemy has a battalion of melee warriors. If the warriors are just standing still, half the time, I can just tell my archers to attack the warriors, and the warriors just stand there taking it. But overall, the AI is very good.

Overall: You seriously must get the game. You don't even have to really like Lord of the Rings. Before, I was pretty neutral to LotR, but now I'm a big fan. Your only two prerequisites for enjoying the game are: 1. You must have a very good computer, and 2. You have to be able to appreciate the RTS genre.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/22/06