The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth 2 Review

The AI has a few faults that were getting on my nerves in several missions. Your units sometimes stand idly by as the enemy marches right passed them and starts tearing down every structure in sight. More often than not, players may find themselves giving out specific orders to troops throughout the map. In larger areas this may cause needless confusion and disorder. Throughout most of the game everything worked fine... expect for a few weird issues. It may sound unorthodox, but one time I actually ran into an invincible troll. Eventually the troll marched into my base, squashing ever unit, destroying every building and killing all of my heroes. The situation, thankfully, returned to normal once I reloaded the game. Granted, this only happened once, but it really tried my patience at the time, since I had to play the scenario nearly from the beginning.

Never go to war without an Oliphant.

The Orc filth is being washed away.

Putting such mishaps aside, it's obvious that other aspects of the game are in tact. Unit balance, for instance, is excellent. Each Mordor unit can be countered by units and heroes from dwarven and elven ranks. If you use their abilities skillfully to your advantage and couple them with solid tactics, you'll be able to withstand even the strongest enemy attack.

Regarding graphics, it's really hard not to drool over this game. Seriously. The design and art team did a fabulous job on every single location that appears in the single-player campaign. Also, here's to the animation team that went all out to make the movement of each and every unit on screen seem believable. In addition to that, you'll see some amazing spell effects, like when you summon a great Flood to wash away an entire horde of orcs. Water effects are without a doubt some of the best I've ever seen in a game. I sought to play the game with practically every single effect beefed to the max, but, unfortunately, that caused significant frame-rate drops - even though I was playing on an AMD 64 3000+, with a GeForce 6800 GT and 1 GB of RAM.

If you're looking for any flaws in the audio, don't expect to find them in this game. Everything is top-notch, from the fantastic music themes, to high-quality sound effects and excellent character voiceovers.

On the whole, any self-respecting Lord of the Rings fan should buy this game, despite the quirks that can be found in the plot itself. Of course, if you are a hardcore Tolkien enthusiast and if you're that picky about the narrative, Battle for Middle-earth 2 may not suit your taste. You should be aware though, that the atmosphere in this game sets an example for other real-time strategies.

Many of you may acknowledge that the scale of battles cannot be compared to the likes of games such as Rome: Total War. Still, visually, this game has no flaws. The development team has clearly set certain standards in contemporary animation, design, as well as 2D and 3D art (bearing in mind that most unit models and locations are essentially based on movie concept art from the crew at Weta). The single-player campaigns are appealing. Although you won't encounter anything out of the ordinary in terms of gameplay, it's still a fun ride.

You'll find that there's a lot to return to once you've completed both evil and good single-player campaigns. Regardless if you are a LoTR fan or not, you can be sure that The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth 2 is worth the money and the time you invest in it.