Great Online Play, Great Single Player, Great Battles, and Is a Must have RTS.
In the Battle for Middle Earth II you have command of the good and evil side. You will control what they build, what they do and how they fight. Additionally you can choose which battle you want to fight. The Good campaign is around the same length as the Evil campaign. Because tolken has the movie license and the books the game was able to cover all the events happening with the fellowship and Frodo going up mount doom. Undoubtedly its usually hard to create a game with a good story line using books and movies but EA made it a clean cut game where Elves and Dwarves team up to fight goblins and Gondor and Rohan are one to fight Isengaurd and Mordor. With all the variety of unit’s hero’s in the books and movies, characters could be places in the race they were suppose to be in and fight along with their own kind.
Comparing the two games on PC and Xbox 360 one could easily tell that the Xbox 360 version is the identical to the PC version except for some factors. Both the PC and Xbox 360 version of The Battle for Middle Earth 2 has an evil and good campaign each with 8 missions. You also have a skirmish mode in which you are able to battle any enemy you choose on any map you want. The skirmish game mode in battle for middle earth has all the maps even many from Battle for Middle Earth 1. These maps were not included on the PC version without a mod so on the Xbox 360 version you can battle it out in helms deep or other old maps. More maps in the 360 version offers a bit more game play than the PC version. An aspect of the game which was loved by everyone on the PC version was taken out in the Xbox 360 version. The Create a Hero option was removed. The Create a Hero Option allowed you to literally create a hero and choose how he looks like, you were able to bring this hero to various battles and level him up throughout the game. The Create a Hero Option would have been a great add-on to put in the Xbox 360 version.
The campaign in Battle for Middle Earth 2 is straightforward and looks like it was made for newcomers in the RTS genre. You are put into a story line and given tasks to accomplish. The Battle for Middle Earth 2 campaign usually starts you with structures and you must build a certain number of units to defend your base or raid enemy camps. The story line is quite predictable because enemy units keep coming wave after wave to attack you and you have to stop them. The pattern is usually the same for all the levels and it gets quite repetitive throughout the game. The campaign is really like a huge tutorial, you have to do small tasks that you probably have never done before if you are new to Battle for Middle Earth. All these tasks will teach you how to make units, how to upgrade armor and units, and how to attack and build structures. They all get you ready for skirmish and online play so you know what you’re doing when you play your friends online.
In the process of building an army you are able to build hero’s that will future aid you in your victory. Such hero’s are: Gandalf, Aragorn, Théoden, Gimli, and the Nazguls. Every hero is able to take out a large amount of enemy forces and the higher level they get they harder they are to kill. The more enemy units you take out the more power points you will get. PowerPoint’s are points you get when you kill enemy units. When you have a certain number of PowerPoint’s you could buy certain powers that will hurt the enemy or make you stronger. Examples of these Powers are: Earthquake, Army of the Dead, The Eye of Sauron. Every Power will help you and they are needed to win the game.
In an RTS such as Battle for Middle Earth 2 the online component is very important because it will offer more replay value. The online on the Xbox 360 version is quite different than the PC version. Firstly in the Xbox 360 version you do not have the ability to join any game you want unless you are invited by a friend through live. You have to let it search for a game and put you in it. On the PC you have the ability to pick what ever game you which to go to. A key factor that makes the two different online is the game play modes. The Xbox 360 version has 5 game play modes, the regular skirmish in which you battle it out free for all, Capture the Flag in which teams compete to capture and hold flags around the map, king of the hill, resource race, and hero vs. hero. All these different types of game modes make the online gaming on Battle for Middle Earth 2 360 very complex and greater in value.
The question that everyone has wanting to know is how the control layout is on the Xbox 360 gamepad. The control layout is as simple as an RTS game on a console can get, the Xbox 360 gamepad seems to fit right in with the layout. Your main buttons are ‘A’ and the two triggers. ‘A’ is the master button which controls where units go, where buildings go, and who you highlight. The left trigger allows you to select all military on map so you don’t have to click them one by one. While the Right trigger brings up the order menu in which you need to choose the buildings, units, and upgrades to buy. To move around you simply move the joypads. They will move around for you and also let you zoom in and out of the battle fields. Those are basically the controls, there very simple and straight forward and are very easy to get use to once you’ve played a couple of missions. Because you don’t have a keyboard and mouse you tend to send units in large quantities to attack instead of spreading them out like you would on PC. The Xbox 360 controller is great for this game but if you are wanting to spread your units around the map you might have a hard time doing that.
Gameplay usually stomps graphics when it comes to game but in today’s society games must have good graphics. The Battle for Middle Earth on the 360 was super when it came to that aspect. The graphics were beautiful on HD and the terrain detail was stunning. The only visual aspect is that the shadows were very low resolution if you zoom in and look. With the power of the 360 Battle for Middle Earth could have easily handled better shadows than the ones that EA put in the game. There were also frame rate issues throughout the game. The Game would often move slowly when you are in a large scale battle and the menus would load up slow. Also during the single player campaign the game would stutter every now and then for no apparent reason. A patch might later on be released to fix these issues but it does not look like it will anytime soon. If you are running a top of the line computer the graphics will look better on it because of the high resolution. Electronic Arts could have made the graphics better but they were good enough and the game play overshadowed them.
Playing as almost any race in Middle Earth The Lord of The Rings: The Battle for Middle earth II for the 360 is a great example for future RTS games on consoles. The control layout was great, the Gameplay was great, and the graphics were not that bad. Both the PC and the 360 version are great and are the same and different in certain aspects but are both worth the buy. The Xbox 360 point system also draws this game to be bought on console if you are driven by achievement points. This is a huge surprise that a Real Time Strategy game has worked perfectly on a console and all gamers look forward to future Real Time Strategy games on consoles. Most say that the day Real Time Strategies are playing on consoles is the day that the world ends, well the world did not end it has only gotten brighter because of this game.