• Official Site: Battle for Middle Earth II
• Developer: EA L.A.
• Publisher: EA Games

Not another game based on a movie license, I hear you say. After all, games based on movie licenses have rarely been fun, and it’s clearly a matter of milking the money cow. Is Battle for Middle Earth II a worthy game to complement the Lord of the Rings movie series, or is it just another pretty RTS with little fun?

Battle for Middle Earth II is the sequel to the real-time strategy game from EA Games. The original game followed the movies’ path, following the adventures of Frodo and his merry band of friends (or not so merry.) In the sequel, you have more freedom, although the campaigns of the game aren’t dynamic, rather they follow a linear path. There are three new races to play as and fight; Elves, Dwarves, and Goblins. You can now place buildings and cities where you want them. Resource gathering is an afterthought here, with more emphasis placed on combat. You can also create your own hero (more on heroes later.)

When the going gets tough, you can summon heroes. Heroes are much tougher than the average unit, and have special powers which you accumulate through battle. Some powers are passive, staying active at all times, while others require your discretion to use. Powers can range from the mundane, such as healing a unit, to the truly awesome, like wiping out a huge amount of enemies in a single blow.

Heroes, like other units in the game, can level up and become more powerful and efficient in combat. This adds a lite-RPG touch to a RTS game that doesn’t bring much strategy to the table. Strategy consists of matching unit with unit; cavalry wipes out infantry, pikemen take out cavalry, siege unit vulnerable to missile fire. EA Games kept this simple, so as to make the game as accessible to the general populace as possible.

If you so desire, you can create your own hero. This adds a nice personal touch to the game. The hero you make can be used in the War of the Rings campaign, and even in online matches. You get 10 points to select between 15 powers in all. When you start playing your hero, as he/she/it levels up, you’ll gain the powers you chose in the hero editor.

Battle for Middle Earth II comes with an interesting Risk-style game called War of the Rings. It features an overhead map, turn-based gameplay, and requires a bit more strategical thinking on your part, as well as tactical. Think of it as manager-mode, where you manage armies, acquire territories, and eventually control the whole land. When you attack a territory, you can choose to go into battle in a traditional single-player campaign, where you control the outcome. Or you can choose to let the A.I. calculate the battle and outcome for you.

You get to choose between the good and evil campaigns, and each campaigns contain 8 missions, making 16 missions in total. Once you’re done with the campaigns, you can join random skirmishes, and set the parameters for each one; race to play, difficulty, map, etc. Multiplayer matches can be fun, if you can stay online long enough to actually enjoy them.

Which brings me to my next line of topic: stability. It seems Battle for Middle Earth II was rushed out the door too early, because in its current state, it is buggy. As fun as the game can be, there’s a large amount of frustration involved when the game is constantly crashing and bringing you back to your desktop. After a number of this happening, I checked the official forums, and it seems I’m not the only one experiencing this problem on a constant basis.

There are other issues with the game, such as balance issues. Some races, like Mordor are vastly underpowered, while others are too powerful after a certain amount of upgrading takes place. Also, walls are fairly useless in most cases, because they just don’t last long enough for most attacking units in the game. This ruins a lot of strategy element for the game. Trying to zoom out enough to see your whole force is frustrating at best, because you can’t zoom out far enough in this game. As a result, you have to scroll around more to compensate.

Graphics are stunning in Battle for Middle Earth II. The water looks realistic, making naval battles a treat to the eyes. Every unit casts a real-time shadow. Unit animation is superb, sporting little touches like a hero being knocked off his horse, and hopping back on to join the battle again. One of the drawbacks, however, of the nice graphics is the inability to render a vast number of units. Armies are nowhere near the amount you’ve seen in the movies, it’s more like a village against a village rather than army versus army. So while the graphics recreates Middle Earth nicely, battles aren’t so accurate.

Battle for Middle Earth II sports excellent production value. Voice-overs are done by the original actors, and the sound effects are all top-notch. Music is straight out of the movies, and that’s nothing to complain about. You can tell EA Games got unrestricted access to assets from the movies to use for this game.

That doesn’t keep the game from feeling like the same old RTS that we’ve been playing for years now. While the game adds little bits of uniqueness here and there, there aren’t enough. The single-player campaigns are traditional fare, and if it weren’t for the War of the Rings campaign, this sequel wouldn’t have offered enough over the original game to warrant a purchase. If EA Games were to iron out the stability issue, make walls at least useful, and balance out some of the races and units, this game would be more fun to play. As it is now though, it’s mediocrity at best.