Can a Real Time Strategy be played on a console? While most people would say no, Glorfindel would beg to differ. There are fewer control scheme problems than you would imagine, playing this on an Xbox 360. Although I still would say you can feel the absence of a mouse and keyboard, it actually is quite manageable.
LotR:BfMEII takes place during the War of the Ring, uses the movie licensed characters, but you never see any of the Fellowship (besides Boromir in the tutorial). Instead the game focuses on battles all around Middle Earth, like cleansing the Misty Mountains, helping the dwarves in Blue Mountains regain their tunnels, protecting Rivendell, allying with the Men of Dale, and finally a march to Dol Guldur to storm the citadel. And that's just the Good campaign. Battle for Middle Earth allows you to use either the forces of Mordor or the alliance of men, elves and dwarves in two separate campaigns.
Catapults, trolls,
archers and warriors.
One objective is to
remove this dragon from the Blue Mountains.
Although you get humans, the only builders you get in the good campaign are of the elf or dwarf variety, each containing different units and strengths. With elves you get about 5-6 different combat units, dwarves adding about the same. You can build forges to research better armor, blades and arrows to apply to the units. Elves also get the ability to build Entmoots so Treebeard or other ents can join you and putting an Eagles nest on the fort to generate these flying units. Mordor forces get trolls and dragons. Elves build Mallorn trees to generate resources, dwarves build mines, orcs build slaughterhouses. One other point of interest is that the mines the dwarves build can be used as a tunnel system to transport troops quickly from one place to another.
The game features heroes that had lesser parts or brief cameos in the movie. The main two characters of the good campaign, for example are Glorfindel, an elf, and Gloin, a
dwarf, both of whom sat in on the Council of Elrond. Arwen and her father Elrond also come in to play on a few maps.
You get a variety of spells at your disposal purchased by obtaining spell points that increase every map. Spells include healing, earthquake, meteor showers and floods. AND don't forget the summon Tom Bombadil spell. About time he was able to make an appearance. Their is also a spell that enables you to triple the ouput of a resource generator. Spells have a cool down time to prevent someone from being able to level the entire enemy force using meteors or making an invincible unit by healing them infinitely.
The key control element that is a little annoying is the bookmarking of units. I'm not sure, just using a 360 controller how one would go about making this more
The final battle for good takes place at Dol Guldur.
Slow down can occur with too much onscreen.
manageable. You can select various units and put them all into a group and use one of the bookmarking spaces provided. Everytime you want to select this group though, you have to pull the right trigger to bring up the menu, find the bookmark icon, open that, move over until you find the number of the bookmark you want to select and press it. If that group isn't on screen you press the Y button to go through hotpoints in the battle until you've reached your selected target. In a pinch it can be difficult to get the units you need to the places you want, short of selecting the "Entire Army" option when you are in a hurry.
To me, the objectives are very ingenuitive, but this is coming from a guy who hasn't really played an RTS since Warcraft II. Defending cities, attacking outposts, eliminating certain characters, leveling a fort and lighting signal fires just to name a few. I was slightly disappointed in the number of levels in each campaign. Some of them
can get rather long, so I'm not particularly complaining about overall shortness. Naval units though, for example. You really only have a chance to use boats in two of the eight stages in the good campaign. I would have liked more opportunities to just build a massive fort and stage attacks, wiping out the enemy outposts, having all units and buildings and races available to me.
I did actually notice a little slow down in some of the bigger battles. The main problem with this was being able to issues commands. I found myself hovering over the unit I needed to give a command to and pressing the button several times before it actually accepted my command. I think that's really the first slow down I've seen on 360.
Graphically this game is very detailed, very smooth, and good looking. The cutscenes are of pretty poor quality and look like something that could have easily been done better last generation, but with a game from EA, you can't really expect excellence all around. They have to do a crappy job on some part of the game.
I didn't try any multiplayer matches, never played an RTS multiplayer, and don't really have a desire to.
If you like Lord of the Rings and even semi-enjoy RTS, give Battle for Middle Earth II a shot.