LotR: Battle For Middle Earth II XB360 Review Dallas TX

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Lord Of The Rings: Battle For Middle Earth II shares two important distinctions. Firstly, it's got the longest name of any Xbox 360 game to date - beating out Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis by a whisker. Secondly, and more importantly, it's the only RTS game to rear its head on the Xbox 360 so far. For a console that's otherwise defined by FPS games, fighting games and intermittent flirtations with RPGs - mostly ports themselves of PC titles - it's a bold move. Bold inasmuch as RTS games and consoles have never been particularly successful - the common wisdom is that it's just not possible to get the same control precision that a keyboard and mouse combination offers with just a gamepad, even if the number of buttons has increased a great deal in recent years.

Unlike other PC ports that EA's done recently - the shiny-but-bugged Battlefield 2 being the obvious candidate - it's clear that quite a bit of work has gone into BFME2's console iteration, especially in the area of control. It's not perfect, but with a combination of shoulder buttons (to bring up the contextual Palantir selector) and some quick button jabbing, it's easy enough to select particular units and give them moderately complicated orders to follow, although anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with PC RTS titles will no doubt still find it a touch fiddly.

BFME2 is set in the northernmost part of Middle Earth for the main campaign mode, which sees you controlling either the good or evil factions through eight maps each as you vie for control of the destiny of Middle Earth. It draws on both the recent film's mythology as well as the other Middle Earth works of Tolkien, EA having picked up the licence along with the film rights. The look is still decidedly film-based, with snippets of audio from the film along with a few guest voice roles for the mission explanations. For the RTS veteran, the mission mode will largely seem a little easy, primarily because the enemy AI is fairly predictable and tends to just try tank rush style tactics in obvious sections of the map. It's arguable that the campaign mode is just the warmup for multiplayer though, where BFME2 offers more variety, with modes both suitable for quick ten minute battles and more epic affairs. It's here, though, that the lack of the War Of The Ring mode is also felt; imagine being able to play out the entire war online. Maybe next time.

It's well worth noting that if you have already played the PC version, or have a PC capable of running BFME2, then that's by far the better version. EA's done a decent job with the transfer from mouse to gamepad, but that's all it is - a decent job, not a replacement for mouse precision. The epic War Of The Ring mode that gave the PC version such legs is missing from the Xbox 360 version as well, replaced instead with maps that were already in the first BFME game, and EA's already out of the gate with the first Xbox Live Marketplace maps to boot.