Horrible frame rate issues and clunky controls may ruin your experience.
Story in Battle for Middle-Earth II is not interesting by any means. Game is set mainly in the northern regions of Middle-Earth and you mainly play as Humans, Elves and Dwarves in Good campaign while Evil campaign focuses on Goblins. Story unfolds as painting-like images and in-game cutscenes, all of which are delivered by Hugo Weaving's voice as Elrond. Unfortunately that is not enough to make this journey worth making in terms of its story.
Graphics are detailed and atmosphere they help to create is truly Lord of the Rings. But what it gains in detail it loses in frame rate: there's a constant slowing down in frame rate up to a point that the game feels virtually unplayable and just annoying. Units are way too small and look too much alike so it might be hard to tell what unit does what. It doesn't help much either that the loading times are way too long and there are too many of them. Your experience is constantly interrupted by a loading screen or just a freezed screen that loads.
Music is the best part of Battle for Middle-Earth II. Orchestral tunes from the movie trilogy are truly music to your ears and the sounds of battlefield are very life-like. On top of this the voice acting is very well done and of course the most memorable is Elrond telling the main story. In its audio department Battle for Middle-Earth II delivers in every front.
Gameplay is real time strategy with a game pad. Controls are made simple, but at the same time they are very clunky and slow. Luckily the enemy AI is not that aggressive so you usually have enough time to make necessary adjustments before heading to battle.
It would have been easier for a gameplay standpoint to put just two factions waging a war like GDI and NOD in Command & Conquer series. Instead of that we now have six different factions, whose units do basically the same thing, but have different appearance and different names. This means that you as a player have to do multiple times the work you would have to do, if there were only two factions waging this war. In my opinion it's just unnecessary complicated.
Single player campaign is also quite short. The Good and Evil campaigns consist only eight missions so there are 16 missions to complete in total. Luckily nowadays this game is not so expensive that you would feel like you're not getting your money's worth.
Battle for Middle-Earth II also contains a functional multiplayer component, where you can fight against other human players. Problem is that these battles are very slow-paced and long. This means that you very rarely get to play a match from start to finish before your opponent decides to leave.
The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth II opened the way for serious RTS games in consoles and for that it's a title worthy to remember. Unfortunately its controls are so clunky and the frame rate is so horrible that I only recommend it to a true Lords of the Rings fan, who doesn't have a PC for gaming.