"Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2" by Electronic Arts

Instead of buying the RTS everyone is raving about, "Company of Heroes", I thought I would save myself a few bucks and pick up LotR: Battle for Middle Earth 2. I guess you get what you pay for.

Before I talk about the game itself, I want to add a few comments about my personal bias. The truth is that I am not a real RTS fan anymore; I prefer turn-based strategy games that don't depend on zooming the camera around constantly and clicking the mouse furiously. The last RTS that I really LOVED was "Myth: The Total Codex" and "Myth 2: Soulblighter", back before Bungie got borged by Microsoft. (Although I also liked Homeworld by Relic, who also made Company of Heroes.)

That said, BFME2 is an RTS clickfest. If that is your kind of game, your experience will be different from mine as my experience was not all that positive.

the pluses

On a positive side, they have done a terrific job with the feel of the game interface. The music is great, the interface graphics are beautiful. The unit graphics are great. This is a great looking game that pays respect to Tolkein's universe but is held back by gameplay problems.

pacing the opening

The opening mission of this game was like a blockbuster movie after a few marketing execs got a hold of it. For the first mission of the game, there is just too much going on. 4 heros, no hints, battle, battle, battle. The first mission was easy enough to pass but it made me frustrated and got me thinking about ADD and how little attention people seem to have without explosions to focus us.

Oddly, the second mission was slower with better pacing. It was your usual "build a base, clear the map" formula. Like the third and fourth missions.

I assume the demo/tutorial would have helped with the pacing but I actually played those months ago and didnt feel like doing it again here so that may have damaged my experience.

interface and gameplay issues

A lot of my complaints may stem from the console-friendly design of the game since this is a PC/Xbox360 product but it is hard to say.

For an RTS, there is no pause? I hit the PAUSE key and it, like, doesnt pause. There is also no quicksave! On top of that, saving itself is very slow. It's weirdly slow. All three of these things are standard for any PC, let alone RTS, games.

Another weird thing is the inability to change the keyboard mapping. At first I thought this was disabled only during a mission but I dont see a controls menu anywhere in the game. Which is a) unusual for a PC game and b) annoying as hell since I dislike the default keymap.

Needless to say, you have to zoom all over creation in this game so the movement keys are important. To rotate you need to use the number pad but to more forward and back you need to use the cursor keys - which means I have to move my hand. Tsk tsk. When I use the number pad to move forward and back (which is what I would expect) it zooms in and out instead. All of which would be fine if I could remap the keys...

Another irritant is that you cannot skip some of the cutscenes. What's that about? It may be because the designers dont want you to miss some critical clue but I havent found a critical clue yet. Let us skip the cutscene if we have already done (and failed) the mission. Sheesh.

Which leads to another gameplay issue. Some of the missions are very unclear what to do - which basically means all you do is clear the map and kill everything you find.

Happily there have not been any bugs yet, which is good, but the pathing is quirky. I click on my dwarf hero only to wonder what happened to him because he never shows up. He gets stuck or forgets or something.

Dare I go on?

• Money. Why do I raise money and what do I do with it? At the start of a level, money is a constraint on building but not for very long. After only a few minutes, you get a lot of money but there is nothing to do with it. Money seems useless.
• By the time I got dwarf units, I began to wonder what some of the units did or were good for and the manual was no help. A detailed in-game help would be nice. Once a unit is made, it is hard to tell what its strengths/weakness are. These games are all about matching units by pro/cons but it appears EA expects me to purchase the $15 Hint Book to be able to understand the game.
• What is the point of stances? This is not Myth, there are too many units to worry about stance - its hard enough just to keep track of where they are. Nor is this game, Total War, which does a much better job of managing unit formations.
• The transition between levels is unclear and unrewarding. In Myth, I really cared about keeping my units alive to the next level. Here, I cannot tell what units go from level to level. Even if I keep all my units alive, they dont necessarily show up in the next mission - only heros seem to. Its like each level is a new game with no carry over.
• At some point I found this bizarre unit-order system menu but no explanation of it in the manual. This lead me to suspect that there was a lot of this game that I just did not understand - and wont unless I search the Internet of purchase the hint book.

closing

Overall, this game is held back by the same things that cause me to dislike most RTS games these days. I can never zoom my camera high enough to get a sense of the battle field. As a result, I am constantly moving the camera around trying to figure out what is going on. Instead of managing my troops, I just select a pile of them and send them off in some direction, often to find that I missed some troops who are stuck in the back lines. When it comes to battles, my pile of units either wins or loses without any real strategy.

BFME2 clearly took a lot of work to develop but it feels like they tried to do too much at once and ended up with ease of use problems. (The usual side effect of the kitchen-sink designs.)

Admittedly, this is just a preview but initial impressions are worth something in this business. If you arent hooked by a game, why invest the time to learn how to play it? Maybe I will enjoy the game more if I spend more time with it. On the other hand, a good game should make you WANT to play it more and at the moment, I would much rather play Railroads!.

updated 11-14-06: added more content.