Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth 2

Review from AJ and AJ - Sunday, 01 October 2006 @ 12:00am

I’m a big fan of the Xbox 360. That’s no secret. I’ve all but turned my back on PC gaming in favour of the squished white box. I’m one of those people who says, “you don’t need a mouse to play an FPS!” and I’m also one of those people who claimed that HD gaming would signal the end of PC gaming as we know it. Well, I’m here to say I was wrong. There, I’ve said it! Now head to the forums and start a flame war about it, because I don’t want to hear about it. The fact is, Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth 2 was supposed to be the game that FINALLY had a control scheme that allowed us PC gamers to play our favourite genre, the RTS, on a console. Unfortunately, I’m just going to have to say, “sorry, EA, PC is still better”.

Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 (herein known as BFME) is EA’s biggest and best attempt at bringing an RTS to consoles. For the most part they’ve done a pretty good job of it, and most RTS fans will be mostly happy with the outcome. Certainly if you’re a fan of the Movie or the books you will enjoy this as a good side story to the main storyline. It is interesting, if nothing else, to play a part in the war raging elsewhere in the world of Middle Earth without having to worry about managing a couple of stupid fat hobbits on their journey to Mordor. The storyline predominately follows the war in the north which is often referred to in the books and alluded to in the movies. Whilst the movies and the books (and consequently BFME1) mainly dealt with familiar regions such as Rohan and Gondor, this new release is based around less familiar places such as Mirkwood, Celduin and Erebor. So unless you’re a hardcore Tolkien fan, quite a few of the races, characters and locations will be unknown to you. But when you’re controlling an evil hoarde intent on destroying the world, names and places don’t mean a whole lot anyway.

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Essentially this game is the same as its PC cousin. It has a few new multiplayer modes and has the addition of Achievements, but the basics are otherwise pretty much the same. Ordinarily this would sound like a bad thing, but when you consider that this is an RTS; the fact that this even vaguely resembles the PC version is pretty amazing. There is a good campaign, and a evil campaign and also a couple of training missions which are essential to get a feel for the controls. Speaking of controls; the controls are the single biggest change to this game from the PC version. EA for the most part have done a pretty good job of having the game actually be playable on a console. This really is the first console RTS that isn’t hopelessly unplayable. So that is a good start. The controls are less than perfect, and can often be a little frustrating if only because of the lack of shortcut keys. It is easy enough to select troops, or a group of troops and if your memory is good enough there are handy combinations of buttons to just select one type of unit. The problem is, unless you play the game regularly, the controls are often forgotten as they are all based around combinations of triggers and shoulder buttons with the “A” button. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to only use the one button, but I personally think it makes selecting units a matter of trial and error before you remember which combination to use…. And this often leaves you in more than a little trouble at critical moments.

In addition to this unusual combination of triggers and buttons, the right trigger serves to open the Palantir…for our purposes we’ll just call it the menu. From the menu you can select powers, heroes, builders and bookmarked units. It all sounds good in theory but often requires too many button presses to get where you want to go. Units, once bookmarked, are accessed by using Left on the D-pad, heroes, powers and builders are accessed by pushing the other 3 directions… of course you’ll have to remember which is which. Getting to bookmarks isn’t so bad, but actually creating them in the first place is a massive pain in the arse. For one, if you have all of your units in one location, it is extremely difficult to select only the units you want to select. More often than not, in the heat of battle it is easier to just send all of your units in at once…. This is a bad idea in multiplayer however when your opponent probably knows his units better than you. For me, I prefer more fine grain control over units, but it just isn’t possible with this control setup. Because of this, battles usually end up an exercise in persistence and brute force rather than organisation and clever tactics. It all sounds terrible, but it is easily the best control scheme yet developed for an RTS on a console. It’s not perfect, and YES it would be better with a keyboard, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far.

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Graphically the game is quite impressive for “an RTS on a console”, the added detail allowed by HD makes the game easy to look at. I did, however, have a go at playing this on a standard TV and found it almost unplayable. The units look very cool and the animations look great, and when at any time you could have literally hundreds of units on the screen, the game is certainly visually impressive. The shadows look horrible however, and some of the textures are a bit on the low-grade side of things, but given the amount of work the xbox has to do to put all of this on the screen, it’s not the end of the world. The amount of detail put into each individual unit is nothing short of amazing, with each unit exhibiting unique animations and movements. If you only play this game zoomed all the way out, you’re really missing out on a lot of the detail this game has to offer. BFME really shows off the power of the 360, and whilst I am sure the game could have done with a little more tweaking, the PC version of this game would bring a super computer to it’ knees, so I think they’ve done a pretty damn fine job of it.

It is difficult to review this game without wishing you were playing the PC version. Everything about this game is great except for the fact that it is on a console. Having said that, this is easily the best RTS to make its way to a console in recent times….that’s providing you have HD. It is the HD that makes the difference here, because for once you actually get a clear view of what is happening has the battle rages. The much talked about control scheme is certainly a step up from past console RTS efforts, but it is the extra resolution that makes this game a step up from its predecessors. Unfortunately, the downside of that extra resolution is frequent drops in frame rate. My console is running outputting 720p and frequently during large battles the frame rate drops to an almost unplayable level. I’ve spoken to friends who run the game outputting to VGA and they’ve not had the same issues, so it may be the widescreen 720p is just a little too much for the white box to handle. In the single player campaign it isn’t such a huge issue, but when playing online it can make life a little more difficult.

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All in all, the single player campaign in BFME is thoroughly enjoyable, each level is very different and a unique strategy is required each time. The skirmish and multiplayer modes are deep, complex and fun to play. I don’t think I’ve managed to get away with a win online yet, but with practice and a little less alcohol I hope to win one any day now! Keep in mind that in the campaign to unlock achievements you will need to complete ALL the bonus objectives as well as the main objective. Something I didn’t find out until well into the game. Fortunately, you can always go back and attempt the campaigns again, so not all is lost. EA have done an awesome job at bring the RTS genre to the 360, but at the end of it all though, I’d hate to say that I still think RTS belong on a PC.

Summary

LOTRBFME2 is quite possibly the longest acronym for any game to date. LOTRBFME2 may sound like some sort of uber l33t sp34k but it is also the best RTS ever released on any console. A fun RTS that requires more brute force than good management. Micro-management is all but impossible, but good tactics are still a must. Just make sure you’re good before you take it online, else you’ll be totally pwned ROFLZ!!!11!1!

Pros

Mostly looks fantastic. Control scheme is actually surprisingly good. The best RTS for a console to date.

Cons

Shadows look horrible. Frequent slow-downs in battle. Still not as good as on PC.