The most popular and famous fantasy world is back once again in a new real time strategy game that takes you through all new Middle-Earth environments, new factions, characters, units and buildings. Set in the same time frame of the movies, book and original Battle for Middle-Earth game, BFME2 takes players on the path of the lesser known northern battles. All the beauty, wonder and excitement seen in the movies and BFME is here again, with state of the art graphics, audio and solid game play.
Game Play
Battle for Middle-Earth II contains three distinct game play modes; campaign, skirmish, and War of the Ring modes. In addition, there is multiplayer player capability for both skirmish and War of the Ring game modes.
There are two single player campaigns within The Battle for Middle-Earth II with one played as a good faction and the other played as one of the evil factions of Middle-Earth. The overall flow and story of the campaign mode is typical of most RTS game storylines. Each campaign is broken up into a series of missions that tell a story, to progress through this story you'll have to achieve certain objectives within each mission. This most often entails defending or attacking on one of the many skirmish maps.
Skirmish mode in both single player and multiplayer is much improved over the original Battle for Middle-Earth. The first noticeable change is the amount of factions or races you can play. Battle for Middle-Earth II allows you to play as either humans, elves, dwarves, goblins or more, giving you a much wider variety of units each time you play. The age old method of each unit being strong against one unit type and weak against another is here and is quite well balanced as is the game’s AI. Each faction has at least one unit that will counter units from opposing factions.
Another change in game play is your base layout on skirmish maps. In the original Battle for Middle Earth, you were confined to a castle with approximately 15 building tiles where you could place structures. This was good if you were planning on defending for the entire game, but when it came to attacking the opposite side of the map, it became a bit tedious to get your armies built and mobilized for battle. Battle for Middle Earth II however allows you to build anywhere on the map, as long as you're builder is present. This gives you the freedom to build a strong home base and a smaller forward base where you can try to launch early or surprise attacks from.
Resource gathering is done by buildings such as mines, farms and llorien trees. Depending on where you build your, each resource building is given a percentage score, the more spread out your resource buildings are, the higher your percentage is. This percentage then determines how fast you will gather resources. Having three resource buildings close together may actually gather less resources that two located farther apart. This is a good concept but it does tend to make your bases almost too spread out. There are times when resource buildings spread far apart are continually attacked, causing some irritation when you’re trying to allocate resources to other buildings or units.
Battles in skirmish mode are very fast paced, intense and seemed to start very early in the game. There wasn’t always the freedom to have a lot of time to build up your base before the onslaught of goblins and orcs began. One minor annoyance in skirmish mode is that if you want to generate higher level units from multiple buildings, each building must be upgraded on it’s own. For example, if you create five barracks hoping to unleash an army of Dwarven Axe Throwers you'll have to make sure each of those barracks has been powered up to the correct level by spending resources before they can create the desired unit.
The most unique game mode in The Battle for Middle Earth II is the War of the Ring Mode. The main objective of War of the Ring is conquering the whole of Middle Earth, province by province. This mode is quite similar to the turn based portion of Rise of Nations, you're given a map of Middle Earth and you must decide which province to conquer/liberate. Ultimately the turn based style of attacking/defending provinces is done when the game moves into a skirmish mode. Here you’ll construct bases and attack or defend territories based on who is attacking whom and the map/terrain will be that of that particular province.
