Product Description

The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth for PC comes from the team that created the award-winning real-time strategy (RTS) PC hits Commander & Conquer Red Alert 2 and Command & Conquer Generals. The Battle for Middle-earth captures the epic battles from The Lord of the Rings films.

The game uses the Generals engine, and players can select from "good" or "evil" campaigns, where they're given the freedom to command a variety of major armies from the films, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses. It uses the digital assets created for the films and features exclusive voiceover from the real actors as well as movie footage from the films.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1243 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Released on: 2004-12-10
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Amazon.co.uk Review
Considering what a huge hit their existing titles have been for them, no one is more upset than Electronic Arts that The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy has finally ended. The games go on though and The Battle for Middle-Earth is a radical departure from the previous action titles, in that it's a real-time strategy game derived from Electronic Arts' hit Command & Conquer series.

As such the game simulates the entire world of Middle-Earth with designs based exactly on those from the movies. In fact enormous efforts have been made to make the game as cinematic as possible with numerous cut scenes and a cleverly streamlined interface. The latter not only makes the game look more visually interesting than other strategy games, with its huge animated map of Middle-Earth and game options only becoming available when you hover your mouse over buildings and units, but also makes sure it as accessible as possible for those unused to playing such games.

The graphics help too and the recreations of the battles at Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith, for example, really do look just like the films, with individual troops reacting realistically to the battle, with human soldiers hesitating in the face of huge trolls and balrogs or cheering and celebrating when defeating a band of orcs. So even if you're usually put off by this sorting of thing, thinking it either too complicated or boring, The Battle for Middle-Earth should appeal to just about everyone except confirmed Tolkien haters. --David Jenkins

Customer Reviews

The best bit of LotR merchandising ever.
THE STORY:
As the forces of good, you control the Fellowship and their allies from Gondor and Rohan as you fight across Middle-Earth before taking your war to the Black Gate itself. If you choose the forces of evil, lead armies from Isengard and Mordor in hunting down the Fellowship and despoiling the lands of your enemy. Levels includes such iconic settings as Moria, Isengard, Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith and Cirith Ungol.

WHAT'S GOOD:
Not only is the best LotR game I've ever played, but it's also the best strategy game I've ever played. Your army fights in units, doing away with the tiresome process of purchasing your forces one man at a time, but you are also given Heroes to control, who add an entire new depth to the game with their powerful special attacks and the bonuses they grant to nearby troops. All of the main characters of the films (Gandalf, Merry, Pippin, Sam, Frodo, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir, Treebeard, Eomer, Eowyn, Theoden, Saruman, Shelob, Lurtz, Gollum and the Witch-King) have been included and each is entirely unique. Also, each of the carefully researched locations (most taken from Tolkien's texts rather than the films) presents different challenges, be it preparing to ambush a convoy of Haradrim or (best of all) desperately trying to prepare Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith for the immanent arrival of the enemy army. Oh, and just wait until you take control of your super special power (the Balrog for evil, the Army of the Dead for good)! Add to all this excellent graphics that even hold up when you zoom right in and a wonderfully streamlined resource-gathering system (none of the AoE '4 wood, 6 gold, 9 stone' rubbish). I would say this is 'one game to rule them all', but I'd have to break my own legs for using such a tired cliche. *SNAP - SNAP - ARRGGGH!*

WHAT'S BAD:
There's really not much to complain about here, but I was a little disappointed about the briefness of the levels in which you just control the Fellowship. I can't help feeling that they could have made an entire game just based on those too few bits. The other really bad thing about this game is the fact that you become so engrossed that you suffer from alien-abduction-style missing time and suddenly realise it's 3AM and you've been playing for six hours straight!

Word of Warning about System Specs
If, like me you brought this game believing various sites claims (including Amazaon's) that the game will run under Windows 98 or ME then you are going to be sorely disappointed and are going to have to waste a lot of time getting your money back.

For those interested the game Specs as listed on the game itself are:-

System : Windows 2000 or XP only

Processor : 1.3GHz

Memory : 256Mb

Hard Drive : 3.5Gb
Only comes on a DVD-Rom and needs a minimum read speed of 8x

Video Card : 32Mb Direct3D (Cards supported: NVidia Geforce 2 GTS or later, NVidia Geforce FX Series or later, NVidia Geforce 6800, ATI Radeon 7500 or greater, ATI Radeon X800).

Sound : DirectX9.0b compatible

Internet: 56.6Kbps for 2 players or Broadband for 2-8 players.

Stunning, in a word
Usually you can rate a game on how long it takes to a) complete or b) have you bored senseless within 5 minutes of turning it on again. For me this has happened with the RotK LotR game, several cricket games (racking up scores of 1000+ on hard does get repetitive), a different LotR game, and a lot of gameboy games.

It is testimony to just how good BFME is that I am still playing it eagerly today, over a year after purchase, coming home for a battle or two over the internet. Part of the great nature of the game is the clear progress you make - you can master easy, then you master medium, then you master hard, then you can go onto the much harder world of online noobs (in other words, players similar to yourself who have been playing a while and can beat the AI with no problems at all), then online medium, before finally the vicious and cruel online pros. Of course I'm not quite at that level yet...

The graphics are very good considering the scale, although they obviously wouldn't hold up in a FPS game. The characters are well balanced (for the most part) and the units are not too overpowering.

However, although I could waffle on for ages about the positives, they have already been covered. I do have some qualms over the balance issues.

The powers mean that no army is safe for long. The Balrog is ridiculously overpowered (and the new patch has just wiped out the only way of killing it so to speak) and can destroy a castle in a single hit. The Army of the Dead can destroy a whole upgraded army with little problem. Rohan is obviously better than the other allegiances - although it only has 7 castle slots, when the starting point is a camp it gets the same as everybody else. Rohan's resource buildings make troops so there's no need to build a unit production building, they have the best cavalry, the only cavalry archers, the best archers (elves) that also double up as deadly swordsmen and further still as pikemen, they have a stupidly large array of high powered heroes AND they can get melee resistant siege weapons on a settlement (Ents). It's too much and a Rohan player will often win an online game with ease.

In contrast, Mordor cannot get upgrades, cannot rank up their heroes and have poor quality troops. You know in a game between Mordor and Rohan (with similar quality players) if the Mordor player doesn't lay siege within 10 minutes the game is going to the Rohan player.