Lord of the rings fans rejoice and indulge you inner fan boy in these epic battles!
There are a few game modes to play. Two campaign modes, good and evil, both are fun. Skirmish, just set up a battle anyway you like. War of the ring, which takes a risk map and lets you do a longer skirmish with more tactics. Then there are the multiplayer modes and online. A lot.
Thats whats good about the game, though the campaigns only have 8 levels each (good and bad) theres tons of content here, plus tons of LOTR characters. You Elrond, Gandalf, Frodo and a bunch not mentioned in the movies that take you behind what most know.
Right away the menu treats you to those excellent orchestrated tunes famous from the movies, and they play throughout the game itself. Voice acting is top quality, and so are the sound effects themselves.
The graphics are good (right now a bit dated for PC) with these cool artistic intros that fade flawlessly into the games rendered graphics (play to find out what I mean).
The great RTS formula is there. Build some buildings to generate your army of assorted styles and techniques, than either defend or attack. There is also that RTS bittersweet element of limiting your soldier count. There are these command points, you get a max of 1000 and a group of fifteen soldiers counts for 60 command points. The limit isn't as bad as I've seen in other games, but every time you play it will hit you in the face.
You can summon all kinds of cool creatures, the eagles, ents, trolls, dragons, wraiths and all kinds of heroes.
Speaking of which, there is a little hero creation, I say little because it isn't that great, but for skirmishes it is fun to make your own elf or troll.
The trolls somewhat outway soldiers, but with the command point system it evens out things.
I can understand that most real time strategies just get to warfare and all, but a little more customization and creation to make an actual city would have been really cool. Also these limits need to be fixed. You can get a very big army together for stuff, but you always wind up cringing for more.
BFME is like that, gives you great stuff for a few minutes, then you have this craving for more.
I love it though, and I picked it up for 8 bucks at wal-mart. If you game a little on PC and like LOTR than get this cuz its sweet.