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

"Quite Fun. Although, the initial glamour of the game quickly fades."

Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth 2 is a Real Time Strategy that offers 6 different factions(Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Isengard, Mordor, and Goblins). These six races may seem quite diverse at first, but each race basically has an equivalent of any other races unit. Each race comes with one type of swordsmen, archer, two or three mounted calvary, pikemen, and a few seige units. Although, there are exceptions. Heroes bring new elements to the table. Each hero can only be accessed by it's own faction. Almost every hero can be purchased also. Another new feature added to this sequel is the Create-A-Hero option. This allows the player to create and name their own hero. This may sound like fun, but the choice of different clothing styles and face and hair styles is very, very limited. The single player mode is pretty short and doesn't have too much to offer. The online mode is what attracts most people to this game. While having typical skirmshes online, there is also a tournament ladder that keeps track of all the games played under this mode. Anyways, onto the specifics:

Graphics 10/10: The graphics are really good causing most computers to have to down the quality of the game a little due to their graphics cards.

Sound 9/10: The music played during this game adds to the "aroma" of the game and makes it more fun and gets the player more involved. The sound effects also do this since the player can hear an occasional "Is that the enemy?" or "We're under attack!"

Controls 9/10: Although most of the simpler tasks are easy to perform, controlling large groups of troops that are spread around is sometimes seemingly impossible to do along with selecting something within a large group of units.

Single player: Not a whole lot to offer. The solo play mode only has relatively few missions in both the good and evil campaigns. The computer AI is easy to manipulate and defeat because it didn't have a whole lot of time put into.

Multiplayer: The online mode of this game may seem good at first, but after awhile, it turns into an exact clone of any online RTS I've played. You might want to jump into this game soon because I'm not sure how long the online fan base will continue to play.

Decisions on Buying: Unless you're a hard core Lord of the Rings fan, I would wait for the first price drop of this game before jumping into it, or make sure you can return it if you're not %100 percent sure you absolutely love it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/06