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Mediocre

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 81 / 111
Date: July 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

LOTR 2 for Xbox 360 leaves a person with mixed feelings. It looks good and sounds good. But there are some quintessential problems which might leave a dedicated gamer dissatisfied.

I am heavily in to RTS (Real Time Strategy), Its my favorite genre, followed by RPG (role Playing games), not much in to FPS (First Person Shooters). I remember starting off with the RTS classics, Tiberian sun, Red alert 2, homeworld, etc, moving on to Generals, warcraft 3, etc.

Now those games had character, it made you think, it made you strategize. In a game like Homeworld, you could never win with out capturing enemy ships. In Command and conquer, it was about resource gathering and key defensive placements.

After playing LOTR extensively the last few days, I havent yet figured out what sets it apart. It is too generic. Its just about make a lot of cheap melee units, and send them en masse to rush the enemy positions.

Finer points of a RTS such as defensive placements, resource domination, specialty units, etc are available, but due to the way the game is set up, you cant really utlize them to the full effect.

Lets go in depth shall we?

I was skeptical about game control issues using a XBox 360 controller as opposed to the trusty mouse on a computer. The interface is about 30% as efficient as compared to using a mouse or having short cut keys or the lot as experienced on a computer.

The Minimap (called the "Palantir" is very vague, you can not zoom in and out on the palantir and you can not issue move commands through the palantir. So most of the times, you will see blue colored smudges which indicate your units or red colored smudges which indicate enemy units. Now these smudges are prominent only when you have about 2 or 3 units in an area. So, if you have just one group of (say) elven soldiers, the blue dot representing them might be so small (read invisible) in the palantir, that you will completely miss them. And honestly after about 2 weeks of playing this game, I still cant locate individual squads by means of the palantir.

Combine that irritation with the fact that you scroll through the map with the left stick and zoom in / out or rotate the camera by the right stick and you have massive control issues.

It is a night mare trying to view a particular area where some thing might be happening. For example, you notice flashes on the palantir, and you want to move the view to that region. Since you cant navigate through the palantir or snap the camera to the region of interest, you will have to manually pan the camera to that region. The camera movement co-ordination between the main map and the mini map (palantir) is based on the direction the camera is pointing at. So it is extremely difficult to move the camera, while your gaze is fixed at the palantir.

I used to curse out aloud as my forces were being attacked and I was hopelessly panning the camera right to left or up and down trying to focus on the region of interest.

Now the game creators did try to solve this problem with some rather half hearted attemtps. If you press down on the left stick you will zoom in on your fortress. Given the fact that you will have several fortresses, and this snap on feature only focuses the camera on the fortress that was most recently built, what use is that?
Also there is the feature, that when there is some thing happening and a warning is issued, you can press the "Y" yellow button to snap on to that region.

This is very quirky, it usually directs to some innane area of the map where nothing might be happening.

This game doesnt make sense when it comes to the warnings that keep getting issued. The irritating voice over keeps crying out warnings at the wrong times.

So it is extremely difficult to keep track of the events going on in the different areas of the map.

Micromanaging units is not possible here. First and foremost, selecting a unit is done by moving the cursor over that unit and pressing "A" (green button). If you hold down the left trigger and press and hold "A", you can select all units in the area. Or you can hit "A" twice to select all units in an area which you are viewing.

But the problem is, how do you select a few particular units of, say, one type. I dont want to send archers and swordsmen to the same battle zone. But then individually selecting a group of similar units is very hard. You will have to hold down the "A" button and move the cursor to the units you want to select. Now if you want a group of archers. You select one squad of archers, keep "A" pressed down, and move to where the other squad of archers are. But if by chance you pass over a squad of swordsmen standing in the same area, they too will get selected. After a while, I stopped trying to micromanage.

Can you imagine that, no chance of micromanaging in a RTS!!

The only way to effectively micromanage units in a RTS is by means of shortcuts. This game offers the concept of short cuts, but in a very usuer unfriendly manner.
Shortcuts are not linked to hardware, but by software (on screen menu) You will first need to select all the squads you want in a group, then hold down the right trigger, then scroll to the shortcut tab on the screen, click on the shortcut tab, then scroll through the shortcut signs (why cant they just use numbers?!?!), and then click on that particular shortcut sign to assign or select a particular group with it.

Now you cant add or remove to this shortcut group, and so with the changing dynamics of the battle, you will need to compeltely restart the procedure of assigning groups to shortcuts.

You read the procedure to assigning shortcuts, now imagine doing this rapidly while in a pitched battle as squads die off and new squads are brought in. You are right, you probably wont be using this much. So you will end up sending all melee and ranged units to the same area of battle.

Next problem is with the way units respond to your commands, you can keep issuing orders to a unit, but most of the times it will just ignore you completely. For example, in the final mission of the "good" campaign, I sent a giant eagle to knock down some archery and catapault towers on the walls surrounding the castle. No matter how many times I ordered the eagle to concentrate on a particular target, it kept flying off to attack some thing else and died in the process.

In this game, You could "theoretically" control the units behavior "aggressive" or "hold ground", thats it. You dont have the option of "defensive", meaning you CANNOT use hit and run techniques very effectively. God forbid if the enemy comes close, your troops will engage them, and will not back out, no matter how much your order them to. The artillery units will indiscriminately shell the region where enemy troops are present, even when these enemy troops are fighting your own troops. Guess they are really open to the idea of collateral damage. And given that your troops generally refuse to obey orders, chances are as your artillery units start shelling, you will take just as much loss from it, as your enemy.

Artillery units can be made to be in either of 2 modes : "Halt auto acquire" or "halt auto fire". Which is funny, because conversely, it is always in "auto acquire" or "auto fire" mode, and in either mode, the artillery unit WILL fire automatically when it sees the enemy. And in a battle you WILL take collateral damage.

Resource gathering is done by placing static resource generating units (like a tree for elves, a mine shaft for dwarves, a tunnel for goblins, etc) in various locations of the map. Now you can only place these resource generating units at a fixed distance from each other. If they are too close, then they infringe on the other, and the efficiency of the process is reduced.

So you are required to explore the map and keep placing resource generating units at diffent locations. But this creates an extremely big head ache in terms of defending these important resourcers. Since you can only build defensive structures, like walls, at a fixed distance from a fortress. You will need to keep building fortresses all over the map to defend these resource generating units. Now each fortress is 5000 gold, about 25 times the cost of a standard squad of swordsmen or archers (this gives you an idea of how expensive it is), so you will not be able to build too many of these fortresses. So your resource generating units might be left undefended, and thus your revenues will run even lesser than before. Of course you can dynamically defend these resource generating units by moving soldiers to the resource generating units if under attack. But then with the whole concept of rush tactics and massed troops squaring off in pitched battles, you wont have squads available for guard duty of resourcers.

Another surprising problem in this game is the save game feature. You can only save a set number of games.

This is the single greatest flaw in this game.

So if there are 16 battles (8 each) for the good and evil campaigns, you might be allowed to save a total of about 10 games. So effectively, you wont be able to go back and play a certain scenario after finishing both the campaigns. I dont understand why those stupid developers had to limit the number of saved games a person can have!

The way this game works is also surprising. For example, when my elven and dwarven armies stormed the black castle in the final mission of the good campaign. I was met with a "Balrog" that pretty much decimated 3 of my squads and killed a hero. And then started coming towards my buildings. I dispatched a Giant Eagle, and it just killed that balrog within a second. Now this verisame eagle is not very effective against other units of the same kind. It can get killed pretty easily by say 3 groups of enemy archers. This is very confusing. You might build up defenses or an attack force by estimating the relative strengths and weakness of your forces and that of your opponents. But then the units might react in a way completely unforseen, and this might turn the tide of battle.

One more problem here is, you are limited to the number of units you can build. But then you might receive reinforcements, which might be of no use but which might push you over the limit. You cant kill or retire certain units like ents or giants or ships. So you might end up keeping those useless units, while retiring useful units to get units that you desperately need.

E.g.: when facing melee battles, you might end up having to decomission swordsmen, which you do need, to get some specialty melee units, like Mirkwood archers, which have greater damage potential. And at this time,you might have 4 ships lying at anchor doing nothing and no way of retirng them.

Another problem with this game are the walls. Firstly they are SUPER expensive and not too strong. If a certain section of a wall breaks, you cannot rebuild it. And depending upon your race (elven / dwarven/ human, etc) you might be able to repair it. And there are these big wall hubs that you need to build, which in turn expand to form walls. Now the sections of the walls can be modified to hold catapaults or archery towers or wall hubs. If a certain section of the wall is under attack, you cannot ask your builder to repair it. You will have to sitback and watch it get demolished. Then after the assault is over, you will need to destroy the rest of the wall yourself, to get to the "wall hub" and then have a fresh new wall built. Now this new wall cannot be built in the same spot as the old wall, so you will have a mess of overlapping walls all over the area in a region of heavy conflict.

Also you cannot have your structures repaired by the builder, you might have a spell to do it (again race dependent). But since you are limited to the number of spells you can have, you will find you will go for spells which are more useful than "struture repair", some thing that kills the enemy.

Lastly, there is very limited strategy employed in this game. Like when playing the skirmish mode, against brutal enemies, you will find that the enemy has NO limits on the amount of money and the number of troops he has, where as you are limited. The only way you can win is by building large numbers of soldiers. Your cash flow is limited, and if you were to spend money on upgrades (like better armor or weapons and which are extremely expensive), you wont have money to built more troops for the meat grinder. And you will loose the battle.

This game is dismal as compared to the real RTS gems, it hardly has any element of strategy.

It does try to innovate in some new areas, like you have a points system, you earn points by killing enemies, and if you have enough points you can "buy" spells. But then if you have a lot of points, you can pretty much buy all the spells. Then you can let your armies rest, and fight the enemy by spells. Heck, I have done this so many times.

For an RTS, this game limits you from having the units you want to field, it doesnt allow you micromanage them, it doesnt allow you to deploy them or view their actions, or in any way control them or let them be effective. You can only build up massive armies and send them to die, and keep doing so to merely survive against the enemy. So the spells are the only way you might actually establish an edge over the enemy.

Its dismal really. Imagine, playing red alert 2 with just nuclear strike (or weapons of mass destruction, like the weather machine) and having quite ineffective tanks or armies! Imagine no apocalypse tanks! Just masses of conscripts!

The spells go on to allow you to deploy a hero (like Tom bombadill) or soldiers (3 squads of Dale men archers or a group of eagles, etc). I guess the developers of this game themselves realised the futility of having armies being strategically commanded in this game, and have pretty much tried to replace the strategic element of a conventional RTS gaming with the concept of spell casting.
It is disgusting!

Overall the game does look good, however, you cant zoom in too close. The sounds / music are nothing to die for. The voice overs are EXTREMELY irritating. The elves sound like goody two shoes whom you will feel like punching on the nose.

While supposed to be such tough warriors, these elves certainly sound like wusses.

Its an irritating game. And with just 16 single player missions, The skirmishes are extremely boring. So for $60, it is not enough value for money.

It is a very sad attempt at introudcing RTS genre to the TV console game sector.

Would I recommend buying it? Only after the price falls to under $20!

Regards,
Kaushik Lodh

Just OK

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 25 / 31
Date: July 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Another highly anticipated game for me, but yet another game that you feel slightly disappointed with. EA has a bad habit of making games that just do not live up to the hype and this unfortunately is one of them.

The graphics are fairly good until you get a lot of your armies on the screen at the same time. It really gets choppy with the more you have. Many quick graphics pauses. The small map that shows the entire region is almost pointless. As another reviewer said, if you have one army off by itself, good luck seeing the blue dot on that map to find them. I am not color blind and have very good vision and I could not see it most of the time.

The controls to do many things seem cumbersome. I never played this on a PC, but I would bet PC style controls probably would be better versus many menus to traverse.

Game play itself is sort of fun. However, I find some of it almost too easy and brainless. Unfortunately, as long as you are willing to take the time, you could get through many levels by just continously creating armies and attacking until everything is dead. You really do not need to do anything special or use any special magic. The enemy is usually too easy as well. If you retreat and back away, many if not most will not come after you. Again, if you have the time, just do that and keep building armies until everything is dead.

I really think this game is just OK. Not worth the $60 and not as good as it should be on a next generation console. Though that really seems to be the trend so far with most new games.

ONE RTS TO RULE THEM ALL

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: August 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

When I gave up computer gaming for the cheaper and more simple world of console gaming I had one regret- stratgy games. They are my alltime favorite form of video gaming and I knew that they were next to impossiable to find and translate on a console. The last real time stratgy game I remember on a console was a port of Red Alert 2 on the old Playstation. When I heard LOTR Battle for Middle Earth was coming to the 360 I was hopfull but still afraid it wouldn't work- but I was happilly wrong. The controller works GREAT- not quite as good as a mouse but it is the next to the best thing. In fact one can argue that the camera control works better witht he 360 than the pc.
All that aside this is also just agreat game. It is very balanced and a lot of fun. The cpu is smart and tough and gives quite a challange to you. But of course the real deal is this game on Xbox live. It is a lot of fun and there is a lot of challange. I cannot reccomend this game enough. I just now pray that the upcoming C&C game will also be on the 360. PLEASE ea make it so.

Great Console RTS

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Let me start by saying im a huge rts fan, if only i could have all those hours back, never learn i guess. Ok down to business, when i fired up LOTRBFME 2 i immediately went online and played a couple matches ranked and unranked. I prefer to play unranked cause you get a lot more variety of players and not just the ones who are in it for the rankings. The ranked part is only beneficial for those who want to keep track of all their stats like how many wins and losses and how many kills etc. I meen if leaderboards are your thing more power to you. The fact that you can talk smack while your ents are pummeling someones fortress is great adding some deinate competition factor i ad hours of fun playing online alone. The ea server worked very well the games were never had too much lag or any boots. Sometimes when both sides would have massive amounts of units onscreen there would be a hardly noticeable lag. There still is a good amount of strategy though most players do a building rush along with the typical build more units than the other and keep attacking strategy. The fact that walls are expensive and deiffucult to rebuild and are somewhat weak kind of makes it hard for the defensive player who likes to build a nice base and wear down the enemy. But the game still has a lot to offer as far as variety is concerned there are alot of races with different strengths and weaknesses so learning the goods and bads of each while developing a strategy to exploit the strenghts of your race adds replay value. There are a few hangups managing units is difficult youll find yourself ordering your entire army just to kill a single enemy squad, very hard grouping of units makes it very difficult. also the map is pretty useless other than to give you an overview of the land and you cant make it larger to order units to specific parts and such. Also the resource gathering is a pain forcing you to spread out to get maximum efficiency from them. Hopefully they can somehow fix some of the more frustrating problems with an update from xbox live. Bottom line if you have xbox live, or youre a lotr fan then this is a definate buy,if not then you might want to wait for the price to drop.

Good For Beginners

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am trying to understand the criticisms given by some of the reviewers as I am not historically an RTS player. I have played a demo of Starcraft on my Mac years ago, but that is about it. I generally prefer FPS's and RPG's. However, branching out is good for all gamers to do occasionally, so I decided to buy this game along with Command & Conquer 3. They both looked really cool, and I'm a big LOTR fan. I just started playing this game last night and was a little intimidated by the controls. Trying to figure out how to make more troops, barracks, and towers took a few minutes, but I eventually got the hang of it. Same thing for maneuvering the troops. As I got going and learned a few things I found the game to be entertaining and fun. I've only made it through the first 2 battles, but the taste I got was really good. If you are new to RTS's then I think this would be a good place to start. I don't have a PC, so I'm not sure if using a mouse and keyboard would be better for controlling an RTS. What I do know is that this game is fun, has good graphics, and is entertaining. The only real gripes I have is that some of the cut scenes don't look much better than something you'd see on an original Xbox, and some of the voice overs are annoying and repetitive. Otherwise, buy it used and go for it.

Sweet! But...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: December 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I got this game as a gift and I do love playing RTS style games, but this one fell way, way short.

First of all, the controls of simply moving the arrow around the screen to find your troops was something that took a while to master: left means left right? Wrong. Then, on the first campaign, you have troops to control and after I have them standing in front of Rivendell (to complete the first mission), discover that I left a single leader in the forest, realizing that I have to pick "this single person" and move him to the gates as well; again, not something that is really obvious.

Also, you have this guy in the background saying "You must select something from the Palantir"... After re-reading the sparsely detailed book, do I figure out how to do this, not knowing what so ever, what the heck I'm selecting, what it does, etc. Lot's of trial and error to figure out what does what.

Now that I have them all in Rivendell, I have to now start building, sweet! But wait, what the heck does everything do? There are already things built in Rivendell and while you are trying to move the arrow around to figure out what everything does, you get attacked and are now back to moving troops around...

The graphics are really stunning, but the game play, IMHO really sucks.

Major disappointment.

EA....pull it off!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 13
Date: July 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Didn't purchase the PC version so I can't compare it with that...but the controls are really easy to learn. The gameplay was good and the graphic was ok. I didn't think EA would be able to bring a PC game like this to the console but they pull it off.(using a controller not mouse and keyboard) If you like strategy games like Generals, Act of War,Dawn of War, or etc..you're like LOTR because it's the same concept. One small negative, I did have a little lag from time to time but nothing that serious.

A great Game dont miss it

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 13
Date: July 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Well i will not talk about the game , if you want to know that read the other reviews that are good , i will talk you about this game version.
Buy this game only if you dont have a good pc because the pc version in ultra graphics and sound mode is beter than this one EA made a good work on this game but the controls are a bit dificult beacuse you cant have a mouse or keyboard that are really important in an rts game , in pc version you got 2 more game options that are not avariable in xbox they are "war of the ring mode" and "create your custom heroe" and you got a lot of customs maps to play online , another thing that is not avariable in this version is to play online using 2 players vs computers , you have to play humans vs humans only.
But this version got some new stuff too , you can online talk instead of typing and you got 2 more multiplayer options one of them consist in keeping a post for a certain time and the other one consist in gathering certain quantity of resourses faster than your rival.
So , the conclusion is this , dont miss this game because is really good , if you got a good pc then buy the pc version , if not then buy the 360 version because it was well done too.
sorry for my english , where i live we speak in spanish
have fun

BFME vs C&C

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: June 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is a little less refined than C&C but it has more options to build the races and there are special characters that add a whole new dimension that C&C doesn't have. At first I didn't like the game and let it sit for about 6 months. But then I started gettting into it and played a few online games which really got me going. Be advised though that you have to go through a lot of single player missions perfectly before you have a chance at going online against people that have won the single player game already and recieved bonus heros. C&C is more refined, much more like the old Starcraft. I'd rate them even.

Pretty Decent/ Has a downfall

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 11
Date: September 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First of all the game is okay! I play the 1st one and it threw me off guard alittle with the RPG style of u controlling a guy name Betheror & go on a journey with Morwen to fight the Mordor Host, anyway part 2 is different its like a PC game, u got these little men of dwarves and elfs who u control with a click or should i say drag them to a location to fight or defend or build something at your request, basically there is another battle besides the Aragon & Gandalf & etc. I guess Sauron sent a secret army of should i say armies to the west and north to wipe out, Rivendall, The Gray Havens, Mirkwood, and even where the dwarves live and these group of men like, Elrond, Glorfindel, King Dain, Arwen, Gloin and Thaundril King of Mirkwood, fight this host off of their lands. If u are looking for a strategy game like long hours of play this is a game for you, if u thought this would be a RPG game nann!! its not i was hoping that they could of told u life after Aragon was crown king what happens, it would of been better if u can pick a player, like Faramir, Legolas, Eomer and build your lands and your castle up and form alliances with key players and it would of been nice if u could of declare war on Legolas of Mirkwood and had a warpact with the corsairs of Umbar made it aliite fun, but in this game no! maybe in part 3?? well overall i give it a 7, and beware if u havent play a strategy game in awhile when u play this game your eyes will start hurting, and your eyes will get red!! and u will not even be close 2 the T.V Good luck

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