Review: The Battle for Middle-Earth

Occasionally I'm playing other games than MMORPG, for example strategy games. I picked up "Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth" (BfME), published by EA, to have some light strategy fun. And light it certainly is.

BfME is a classic real-time strategy (RTS) game. In most battles you got a base camp where you gather resources, build units, and command them in real-time. There is no way to speed up or slow down time, and if you pause the game, you can't see your units any more. The resource gathering part is simple as could be, there is only one resource, and you just build resource-gathering buildings like farm, and the resources come streaming in. So all you have to do is to select your armies and battle. Except for heroes, every produced unit consists of 5 men, which means that you quickly have large numbers of men, which looks good on the battlefield. Combat is fast, and there isn't any time or opportunity for much strategy. Not a very deep game, but ideal for a quick orc bashing.

Besides single battles, against the computer or other players online, you can play two long campaigns, playing either the good or the evil side. This plays out on a beautiful huge map of Middle-Earth, and basically follows the story of Lord of the Rings. The movies, that is. This game got it's license from New Line Cinema, who made the LOTR movies, and is leaning heavily on that license. You have voice-overs from the movies, scenes from the movies running in the little info window, screenshots from the movies on the load screens, and so on. That makes you forget how simplistic the game is. It simply is more fun to lead Eomer and the Rohirrim against a pack of Uruk-hai, than to lead standard cavalry against standard infantry. You get to play practically all the characters from the movies, there are some battles where you don't build units but just lead the fellowship of the ring.

There is a "role-playing" element to the game too. Your heroes and units gain ranks, and you get to keep them for the next battle. That is good for the heroes, but kind of stupid for the units. The number of units you can have is limited by your command points, and with taking your old army with you into the next battle, there is not much room to build new units. And without building new units, your unit-building structures don't level up, and you don't get any upgrades. But you certainly don't want your high-level units to die, just so that you can build new level 1 units in their place. As there is no way to disband a unit, you end up taking your lowest level unit on a suicide mission, so you can rebuild it and level up your building. So in the campaigns you play a strange game in which you try to preserve your units, and heal them back up when they are wounded, while the enemy is sending wave after wave of disposable units after you.

In summary, The Battle for Middle-Earth is a strategy game for times when you don't want to think. It has beautiful, large-scale battles, with a strong Lord of the Rings atmosphere to them. They just aren't very strategic.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:45 AM Permanent Link