The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II

The union of Tolkien and computer gamers has mostly been fused through degrees of separation. Tolkien created orcs, which are adopted as your standard evil race in D&D and Warcraft universes and then games are made. Almost every computer fantasy world is a shadow of the rich world that J.R.R. Tolkien created decades ago. Games based directly on Middle Earth have been few and far between.

Well, they were until Peter Jackson made a zillion dollars translating Middle Earth to the big screen.

Yes, the bane of gamers everywhere---movie licensing---has come to the strategy genre with the full force of your typical Electronic Arts title. Battle for Middle Earth II is a sequel to the first game that let you lead Viggo Mortensen and Elijah Wood into battle against Christopher Lee and CGI effects. Though I suppose they are all CGI effects in this context. It is more than reassuring to report, then, that Battle for Middle Earth II is probably the best real time strategy game released so far this year.

Your enjoyment of Battle for Middle Earth II could depend to how much you enjoy the whole idea of Middle Earth. There are six factions drawn from the novels, each one with unique units and familiar heroes. As they fight their battles, they gain experience, opening up new powers and abilities when they reach new levels.

For the heroes, some of these powers can be decisive. Gimli can jump into a horde of enemies, knocking them down and out, while Gandalf can cast lightning bolts, which, to my knowledge, is not in the movies or the books. You also accumulate experience in your “palantir" which can be used to purchase special powers. The good and evil races have different powers available to them, all of which are quite useful in the proper context. Here is where you can get your Tom Bombadil fix.

Good and evil also have different assets. Good's units are generally stronger in a fight and can get truly devastating upgrades. But Evil's units are much, much cheaper---compare a 75 resource goblin to a 200 resource Soldier. So the end result looks a lot like the trilogy where a few brave men cut down hundreds of weaker monsters, but risk getting overwhelmed by sheer mass.

Your units are your usual mix of swordsmen, archers, pikemen and cavalry with every race having its own variations on these classic RTS themes. Setting up formations can be a pain. Some sort of auto-formation ability that would put archers at the rear of the infantry would be helpful. The lack of such a function underscores that this is, in many ways, a very newbie friendly RTS. You don't need a formation button! Just lasso your troops and have at it.

This beginner game mindset is cemented by the economic system. There are no armies of peons to manage or resource areas to fight over. You just build the resource gathering structures you want and let them reap what they sow. The resource structures are pretty fragile, and also count towards your population cap, so you will find a lot of battles center on destroying farms, mines and caverns. Being freed from the peon management means that you are immediately focused on the fun part ---building up your army for the great war. Battle for Middle Earth II has none of the +1 here and -2 there bonus nonsense of say, Empire Earth II. It gives bonuses of plus or minus 50 per cent in some circumstances, but you always know when you are at a disadvantage. The game is all about transparency and simplicity.

But none of this is meant to suggest that this game can't be appreciated by RTS veterans. As simple as the economy is to manage, spending decisions are critical. Do you save up for that hero to lead the assault or invest in better weapons? Does your fortress need more protection or should you splurge on an extra builder? The strategic choices matter, and are highly dependent on the map style and the nature of your opponent.

There are, naturally, campaign modes as well as a pseudo-strategic War of the Ring mode to compliment the skirmish game, but those boil down to giving you new places to fight the same glorious battles.

The artwork and unit models are amazing. There is no interest in making the buildings scaled properly, but such is the way of the RTS. The armies are all ripped straight from the Jackson version of the stories with fidgety goblins, posturing uruk-hai and heroes that closely resemble their Hollywood counterparts.

But it's the animation that will catch your attention. There is a potential for the flying units of evil to destroy everything in sight. This power is limited by the game design decision to have these airborne titans function like giant aircraft---they need to swoop, reposition themselves, lurch, etc. The visual effect of this is to transport you to a world that seems real even as its fantastic elements are right on the screen in front of you.

In short, Battle for Middle Earth II is the movie on your computer.

The art design continues into the campaign, where cutscenes and the occasional “painting" contribute to the epic look. You are on a mission to destroy the forces of evil (or good) and the narration helps set the tone nicely.

All of the sound is good. The battle cries, the voice acting, the music.

Battle for Middle Earth II comes on an eye-popping six CDs, so you will be swapping disks for a while, but this will only inconvenience the most impatient gamer out there. The 6 gigabyte dent it puts in your hard drive is also a little shocking, even in this day of terabyte drives. If any product calls out for buying the DVD edition, a game based on a movie certainly does. It will cost you another tenspot for the DVD Collector's Edition, but it will mean fewer discs crammed into a single box.

The documentation has some serious omissions. The description of the War of the Ring mode isn't very helpful and the manual leaves out some things that most gamers will want to know. If you don't know the powers that a particular hero has---or the effects of these powers---the only way to find out is to summon that hero. So, you may end up wasting a couple of thousand resources on Liv Tyler only to find out that Arwen is pretty useless. Gandalf sounds cool, and is pretty expensive, but he needs to be nursed to his full potential as a mighty wizard. Would you be better off spending that money on a few more pikemen?

The lack of any information on the costs of anything makes the manual pretty minimal as an information resource. The tutorials are marginally better for this sort of thing. You will learn more by just jumping in and losing a few battles than you will sitting on your sofa with the puny booklet.

Battle for Middle Earth II is the first great real time strategy game of the year. You can certainly quibble with its simplistic economic model or the uncertainty of what exactly everything does. You can even debate the experience model that requires Gandalf or Elrond to hang out in the back of an army until they are strong enough to destroy whatever is around them.

And it would be easy to have a positive reaction to the game dismissed as the ravings of a madman obsessed with graphics. A stirring score coupled with dramatic battle scenes has saved many a mediocre movie. Games are no different.