An Exciting Game worth many hours of gameplay.
First lets talk about the most important aspect about a game...c'mon take a guess. No? Ok its Gameplay. The Gameplay of BFME II includes all your standard rock, paper, scissors type game, but BFME II gives you special powers that you can unlock by killing your opponent and gaining experience from it. Although these powers are powerful you will probably use them only several times during one game, due to the long recharge time of the power and the fact that these games don't last very long...Sometimes. My average time per battle seems to be about 20 minutes, maybe I need to up the difficulty from normal to hard? The units are very interesting and the animations are well done. The Interface is nice and simple and also very clean, unlike some RTS games where you have a huge box taking up half the screen. Units will cower in fear if they see a menacing creature such as the Balrog. All this seems well and good but towards the end of the game's two campaigns (Good and Evil) the gameplay may seem...Repetitive. That's where the War of the Ring mode comes in. The War of the Ring mode in BFME II adds a huge map of middle earth where you start with a portion of owned land and move your armies around Middle Earth to conquer others. The game ends once you've conquered all of Middle Earth. Those who've played Total War games would be familiar with this and would highly appreciate this if you enjoyed the Total War games...Such as myself.
The Sound of BFME II is really really amazing. When you have a small army of Calvary at your side you can hear the footsteps of the horses and the men yelling when charging into enemies. Swords sound like swords and arrows sound like arrows but in my opinion the musical score is quite impressive and definitely sets the mood of the event. If you are just building and expanding your empire you will hear soothing, peaceful music. Whereas if you are sending a group of soldiers into your opponents base (or to their death) dramatic music will play. This is something I would like to see more in Video games.
The Graphics of BFME II are simple amazing (taken you have a good card) but if you are playing with a moderate/average system you may suffer from framerate issues when you send your 100+ troops to their doom while trying to save Middle Earth. But overall everything seems to be in place here. Animations are decent along with fighting scenes. The cinematic used here is definitely a good way to use to tell the stories of Good (men,elves,dwarves) and Evil(Goblins, Mordor, Isengard).
Overall This Game is quite solid with a few game glitches here or there that might need to be patched later on. But otherwise I would highly recommend this game to the LOTR or RTS fan such as myself.