I LOVE THIS GAME!
Basically there are two campaigns (One for good and one for evil) and there is the War of the Ring campaign, which is like a middle earth version of risk in which you try to conquer all of middle earth with your armies. I found that more enjoyable than the actual story campaigns (Story is still fun to play).
One of the things that I like about this game is your custom hero. You can't use your hero in the story campaign but you can use them in the War of the Ring which is pretty much the only thing I play now. When you create your hero, you choose the race/faction, the looks, stats, and then the abilites of your hero as well as their name then you're done. Not that hard now is it? It's really fun when I start using them in the war of the ring campaign. Some people find them a bit weak and useless but I found them to be quite useful and if you feel that they are useless there are mods which you can use to change that.
Pros:
- Great Graphics! I love the graphics! Might not be the best but still great.
- Sound is great as well. There are songs from the movies as well as a couple of new ones I haven't heard of before. They are all good and makes playing the game that much more fun.
- Fun and engaging story. The evil and good campaign intersect which is what I found intriging. It was a delight to play and I will probably play it though once more for the fun of it.
- War of the Ring Campaign is what I found really shines this game. Pretty much unlimited replayability. You can choose where you start, your teams and conditions for victory. You can pretty much set every aspect to your liking.
- Custom Hero...Do I need to explain this? It's your own hero in LOTR!
- Big battles. Each time you build a unit, it will have about 15 or so soldiers. That's a lot of people. There may be less depending on your race but the average soldiers, archiers and calvery have 15-20 people each! That's a lot. The battles can be huge!
- Easy controls and interface. I found everything to be easy to use and the game was easy to learn. The interface was great. I had no problems here.
Cons:
- The game crashed a couple of times when I was installing some mods. It was fixed after the patches.
- When I loaded the game for the first time, it took a REALLY long time. I don't know why this happened. It may have been my computer but this has never happened to me before. Luckily, when I loaded the game after that first time, it was fast and pretty much loaded like all the other games.
- Game Intro. The intro movie you see in every game before the game actually loads is usually fun and full of explosions. Not the case with this game. I expected something similar to the movie but it was nothing but the coming of darkness using the ingame engine. It's nothing that serious but I sorta wanted something cool to look at.
I haven't played multiplayer yet but I'm betting that I will be 10 times better than the single player. Right now I'm just playing solo and it is soo much fun. I would recommend this game to anyone even having an interest in fantasy or strategy. This game really owns and I promise you that you won't be disappointed, unless you're those people who complain about every game that comes out. IF you hear about those who are dissappointed because the first game was better, don't even listen to them. There will always be people like that, because they have nothing better to do. Then again there will always be people like me. Those who actually like the game for what it is. Anyway just try out this game if you are interested.