Part of the problem with the heroes is that they walk the line between usefulness and inconvenience. As you can probably tell, the game takes some liberties with the story for gameplay's sake. Sam and a group of Gondor soldiers take on Shelob, the spider queen. Though this seems necessary from a narrative point of view (after all, someone has to summon the Army of the Dead to fight at Minas Tirith), it makes parts of the campaign's storyline a little hard to swallow. Alas, what seemed to be a bold move on the part of EA faded as Aragorn and other characters that were killed in battle simply reappeared in other battles later on.
Another surprise came when Boromir was saved from the Uruk-hai, thus veering away from The Fellowship of the Ring storyline. In fact, one of the most shocking moments in our testing came when Aragorn fell in an early battle and the game went on, accepting Aragorn as a casualty of war. But in other battles, heroes can and will fall. If someone does, you'll fail the mission and have to reload the battle. For example, while controlling the fellowship through Moria, none of the fellowship may die. These can be some of the more-annoying missions in the game, mainly due to the fact that the game is at times wildly inconsistent when it comes to handling hero death. Like in other conventional real-time strategy games, there are some missions in Battle for Middle-earth that require you to navigate through a level with a handful of units, usually heroes, without building anything. This also makes it easier to recognize which units on the battlefield you want to preserve. It's easy to turn a noted cavalry unit into the Light Brigade, for instance. And, in a nice touch, you can rename your regular units to give them some personality. This not only gives you an added incentive to preserve your units, but, more importantly, it also allows both your heroes and your regular units to rise in experience level, making them even more powerful than before. In other words, the army that you have at the end of one battle is the same army you'll have at the beginning of the next. The strategic map does incorporate some welcome features, such as continuity between missions. The living world map lets you dispatch your armies to various regions, so choose the ones with the most bonuses. That means you can spend time mopping up isolated provinces and building up your forces. There doesn't appear to be any hurry to get anywhere, either, as the final battle for both sides can wait until you're ready to proceed. Once that's done, you'll switch back to the campaign map to do it all over again. You'll then drop down into the real-time portion of the game to resolve the battle. When you select an army, the game will highlight any adjacent hostile provinces, and you'll select which one you want to attack next. You have only two or three armies at your disposal, and the goal isn't so much to crush the opposing army as it is to simply conquer as many provinces at possible. And as you gaze upon the living world, with its little details like the Nazgûl flying through overcast skies, the sonorous tones of Ian McKellen or Christopher Lee (both reprising their roles from the movies) will guide you.Īdmittedly, the strategic layer of the campaign is a bit thin. One province may give you bonus resources, another will give you power points that you can use to invest in powerful abilities, and yet another will give you extra command points, allowing you to lead more troops in battle. This is a 3D view of a living, breathing Middle-earth, divided into more than 30 provinces, each of which has special properties that you earn when you control it. This way, you can control the armies of good or evil as you march across the world of Middle-earth, conquering province after province along the way.Īt the heart of the campaign game is the living world map, which is exactly what it sounds like. The game does this by combining an overarching turn-based campaign that's stitched together with real-time strategy missions, allowing you to decide where to take the fight to next. What makes The Battle for Middle-earth work is the fact that it allows you to rewrite the history of the War of the Ring as either the forces of good or the forces of evil. While some might have expected that The Battle for Middle-earth would rival the size and scope of a certain other major real-time strategy game released this year, the truth is that it's more on the scale of traditional real-time strategy games, though its battles are still quite big. Now Playing: The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth Video Review By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's