Real Time Strategy > PC > The Lord of the Rings - The Battle for Middle-Earth II

The Lord of the Rings - The Battle for Middle-Earth II (PC)
Release Date: March 2nd, 2006
Publisher: EA Games
Developer: EA Los Angeles
Genre: Real Time Strategy - Fantasy

Last Updated : June 5th, 2006

Rating: Average rating: 4.33333333333 3 Ratings 5 4 3 2 1

Version @ Time Of Post : v1.04 On-Site Links Patch Information Custom Original Maps Beta Information

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Off-Site Links Official EA Site GameSpot's Entry IGN's Entry GameFAQ's Entry The Battle for Middle-Earth II Maps The Battle for Middle-Earth II @ GameReplays The Battle for Middle-Earth II Heaven Wikipedia's Entry

Battle for Middle-Earth II is supposedly a lot different from the first one. Yes, it's true, I have not played the first one. But my friend has assured me that it is not necessary as BFMEII takes off from the Lord of the Rings story a bit, and just focuses more on the creatures, races, and the battle of the ring. So all comparisons are off for this review for the time being until I play the first one.

I found it incredible how large this game actually is, for what it is. This game is over 5 gigabytes. It doesn't seem it would be that big for what you see in game, but I think most of the space comes from the movies and the sounds. It may also be because there is different versions of textures and the models depending on the quality you have your game set on. Which brings me to my next point. I thought I would have trouble running this game on highest settings, on maximum resolution, but my computer has no troubles at all even in big battles. Their system is very optimized I found.

When I started playing this I thought it would be just your run of your mill real time strategy game, but it is fairly different from other strategy games I found. For example you only need to worry about one resource for everything, and you don't have to get it yourself, you just build a farm to get resources. Your units are also comprised of battalions or groups when they are trained. You don't only train one unit, but a group of them (well standard fighting units anyway).

There is some very annoying features that I found during gameplay. The biggest problem I have is with the Auto-AI, and most of the problems lie within the archers. Sometimes when archers have a long range, and they are shooting at your units, your units won't automatically attack where they are getting shot from, they will sit there and take it. Another archer problem is no matter how advanced or built up your archers are, they will not attack buildings even if they are idle sitting in between like 10 enemy buildings. There doesn't seem to be much prioritizing in the auto attacking either... they will blindly let a wagon trample them over, without even trying to attack it, but attacking something less harmful.

One unique feature I found very interesting is the ability to customize your own hero, and use him during online or single play. You can customize their looks, their abilities, their statistics and some other cool things. You can also keep track of how many enemies he has killed during his play which is neat. They also gain awards for doing certain things.