Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth
- December 10, 2004 15:17 PM PST
- Email this!
The Battle for Middle-Earth marches to a bit of a different drum.
For a long, long time, real-time strategy games had a fairly predictable rhythm to thembuild a base, generate a peon, harvest a resource, build a bunch of guys, go out and conquer. Then along came games like Ground Control II and Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, which mixed things up a bit by eliminating the resources or adding something like squads to the mix.The Battle for Middle-Earth marches to a bit of a different drum, too. Instead of building bases anywhere, you capture base points and then click on special circles on the ground and choose what kind of building goes there. The intention is to make the resource grind less a part of the game and the battles more important, but it also keeps the interface less cluttered and forces you to think about what structures are -really important. The single-player campaign is governed by a giant Risk-style map of -Middle-earth as you move different troops into different territories to take controlyou get to choose your battle based on the kind of reward youll get (more resources, better powers for the heroes, etc.).
Even if these gameplay nuances dont prove to be the genres savior, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth still gets an A++ and nine gold stars for presentation. Its easily the best-looking RTS game weve ever seen with beautifully animated units and cool movie clips that play in the corner to complement the action. The battle for Helms Deep is quite a sight as a sea of hundreds and hundreds of orcs break against the walls and throw up ladders (without any slow-down, we might add). Worthy of the license its wrought from
