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

"One of the best RTS games of all time."

Battle for Middle Earth was made by EA games back in 2007. It is an RTS game for PC and Xbox 360. Here's my review.

Story: 6/10
The story here isn't very solid. And it has nothing to do with the actual story from the trilogy. You start off as an elf named Glorfindel, and you need to warn Elrond andGloin (Gimli's father) about a goblin encampment stationed just outside of rivendell. The cool thing about the story is that you can choose to be good, or evil. Both sides have 8 missions that you can go on. You can save the Shire, or destroy it. Things like this is what the story mode is made up of. I gave this an extra point or two for the ability to choose evil.

Gameplay: 10/10
This is where the game really shines. It starts out like traditional RTS game. That is, you have a fortress and a couple of builders, which you use to builds farms for income, and then use that income on units and upgrades. Some differences include that instead of building units, you build battalions, which can be made up of up to 15 units. The great part about this is that they all fight as a team, and they all die off individually. The one annoying part is that sometimes armies can get so large that it's hard to micromanage them. Sometimes it can be hard to select that one unit you need in order to win. But this doesn't happen often, so it's not that big of a deal. You can play as one of six races: The Men of the West, Elves, Dwarves, Mordor, Isengard and Goblins. Each race has their own specific strategies. If you choose slow but powerful build ups, choose dwarves. If you choose weak but quick build-ups, choose Goblins. All of the other races are somewhere in the middle. You can recruit Heroes from the movies such as Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Shelob etc. You can also choose heroes not from the movies, but were mentioned, such as Tom Bombadil, Drogoth the Dragon Lord, Eye of Sauron, and such. Gollum appears on every map. If you kill him, you get the ring. You need to take the Ring back to your base. Then you can build an extra hero: Galadrial if you are one of the good teams (Men, Elves or Dwarves), and Sauron if you are evil (Mordor, Isengard and Goblins). Of course, they don't come cheap, and they are 10 times more expensive than that of the cheapest hero in the game (that's the Nazgul, by the way). You can create your own hero, and battle with him too. You choose how your hero looks like, customize his stats, and choose his abilities he gains at all ten levels.

Graphics: 7/10
The graphics aren't spectacular, but their pretty decent. When you consider that there can be sometimes hundreds of units on screen at once, it's no wonder. They did add in character portraits for every unit, though.

Sound: 8/10
The music is generally directly from the films. This makes it feel more like a Lord of the Rings game, in stead of something like Warcraft.

Replayability: 8/10
Unlike most RTS games, this one is pretty fast paced. You don't stay in your base for the first 15 minutes. You can get a decent army built up in about three or four minutes. This means that it doesn't have to sit through the boring part in the beginning.

Overall: 9/10
This game is great, and for $15, you can buy this, the expansion Rise of the Witch King, and Battle for Middle Earth 1.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/06/09

Game Release: The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II (US, 03/02/06)