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The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth (2004) (VG)

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7 comments in total

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10 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
The best LOTR game...ever!, 18 January 2005
Author: Sam Cox from Gloucester, England

I bought this game like a month ago and I love it!

You can play evil side or good side in story mode, or just simply play a skirmish. Even better tho is that you can play a friend online!!!

Forces of good - Gondor (great at defending and strong in combat)

- Rohan (amazing horse riders and good archers)

Forces of darkness - Mordor (FREE ORCS and u can buy massive armies

- Isengard - much stronger orcs in armour and wargs!

overall this game is amazing, i usually h8 RTS games due to me getting bored....but this 1 is amazing,...BUY IT NOW!

Peace out

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Excellent RTS game that captures the atmosphere of the movies, 18 February 2006
Author: Sentinel-15 from Antwerp, Belgium

"The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth" is a real-time strategy game for PC's that was made by the people who made such classics as "Dune 2" and the "Command & Conquer" games. The game is obviously based on J.R.R. Tolkien's famous' trilogy, but also very much by the Peter Jackson movie adaptations, in terms of design, voice acting, and original music.

The game presents two "campaign" modes, in which you basically conquer various territories of Middle Earth until there is nothing left to conquer, and a skirmish mode that let's you do single standalone battles either against the computer, or against other players over the Internet.

The "Good Campaign" lets you take control of the members of the Fellowship, as well as other important characters and various armies both of Rohan and Gondor. Most of the missions involve raising an army, building bases and conquering the map, while some focus on key events from the movies. Interestingly, this story mode deviates from both the books and the films, and in various ways. For example, Gandalf will face the Balrog, but in this game he can survive the fight and walk away from it perfectly fine. Same goes for Boromir whom you can save from the Uruk-Hai, allowing him to make it to the end of the story in one piece.

Interestingly you can also play an "Evil Campaign" that throws the original story out of the window entirely, allowing you to conquer Middle Earth while doing your very best to destroy those annoying goody two shoe fellowship heroes. In this campaign you get to control the armies of both Mordors orcs and Isengards Uruk-Hai soldiers, and characters such as Saruman, Lurtz, and even some of the fearsome Nazgul.

Well, what can I say? To me, both campaigns have proved to be a lot of fun. In fact I have finished both several times already, and I still can't get enough of this game. The gameplay is excellent, the controls are easy to learn, especially if you play a lot of RTS games.

The graphics are just beautiful to look at, highly detailed, and fully 3D, meaning you can rotate the view, and zoom in. Hero characters such as Frodo or Gandalf are instantly recognizable, as are the various "races" such as orcs, cave trolls, etc. You monitor your game progress from a gorgeous looking animated map, where you control the movement of your troops and decide which territory to attack next.

Now why is this game listed on the IMDb? Well, because it makes great use of voice actors. Both Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee resumed their roles as Gandalf and Saruman, respectively. Other voices were either sampled from the movie, or read by other voice actors; such is the case for Aragorn, where the replacement actor, Chris Edgerly, did a great job; he really sounds like Viggo Mortensens Aragorn. Also worthy of mentioning is Simon Templeman, who provides several voices for the game, such as the narrator who explains game concepts in the game's video tutorial. You may know him as the voice of Kain, the vampire anti-hero from the Legacy of Kain game series.

Great use is also made of Howard Shores monumental musical score for the LotR movies, with some additional music done is the same style.

All this greatly enhances the feeling of somehow being "in the movie".

The game does have a few flaws though.

The game limits how many units you can build. At the same time, you get to take existing armies with you as you progress through the game; all units gain experience and get better this way. As a result of this you often cannot build new, better units until you somehow get rid of some of your existing ones. The evil side can actually sacrifice units, but the good side does not have any options for disbanding units. This forces you to intentionally play badly and sending some units out to be slaughtered in order to be able to build the units you need.

Also, on occasion "bugs" happen, such as units moonwalking, or getting stuck on the map. For example, recently I had a mumakil (you know, the over-sized elephant-like creatures) get stuck on some bridge; it could be moved around on the bridge, there was plenty of room, but for some reason I couldn't get it off that bridge.

Still, these are minor issues. All in all this is a great game, both for RPG gamers and people who loved the movies.

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Best Lord of the rings game ever!, 1 December 2005
Author: margetic_1 from Australia

Battle for middle Earth was everything i wanted it to be and more. The starting levels with only the fellowship was a little bit boring, but when you get to the sieges it is great!

My favorite level is the siege of Minas Tirth, Helms Deep comes up second.

The only thing that let this game down is when an army is getting attacked it sometimes does nothing and let themselves get killed.

The ancillary battles get boring after a while so its best to complete them quickly, so you can enjoy the bigger battles. The heroes make the game more exciting to play.

Battle for Middle Earth would have been better if the good teams were a little more different, the same with the evil army.

Also if you could play as the dwarfs and elves a little bit more.

Other than that it the best Lord of the Rings game ever. EA games have finally made a game for everyone to enjoy! Recommend to all.

9/10

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Best LOTR game and PC game ever!, 16 July 2006

Author: VertigoStudios from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

When I bought this game, I knew I would like it because I really love the Lord of the Rings movies, I loved this game more than I thought I would. The visuals are great, all the great characters from the movies are in it, the game play is more than excellent, there will never be a PC game that is way better than this in years if ever! So many exciting missions like Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith, The Black Gate, Lothlorien, Moria, Isengaurd, etc. Plus you get to play the evil campaign in this one. You can summon anything with the power of the evenstar(good campaign) or with the power of the one ring(evil campaign). Plus the ending for the evil campaign is dark but cool. You see the Balrog destroying Minas Tirith and Saroun finally gets the one ring back. You can also change the history of middle earth in the good campaign. Boromir can live and you can take him to Helm's Deep and even Minas Tirith. This game is awesome!

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MultiPlayer, 5 July 2006

Author: skimpel

I've played Battle for Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth.

And like(LOVE)it.

This game is well done, its flayed out like the movie and it let you, "Fight the Battle for Middle Earth".

BUT, I want to play multiplayer.

Can anyone tell me, HOW DO YOU PLAY MULTIPLAYER?.

AND what are the other CDs for, just for installing?.

I've been con fused by these things and want some answers.

Please go through the steps for me, i'm a little slow :-).

Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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1 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Fun RPG fantasy game, 1 August 2006

Author: SouthParkFan92 from Canada(Montreal,Quebec)

Rated T for Violence.

Lord Of The Rings: The Battle For Middle Earth is one of the many Lord Of The Rings video games in the series which try to cash in on the new Lord Of The Rings trilogy.The new Lord Of The Rings movies are excellent.Great performances and plot and plenty of battle scenes and special effects make the film series so great.I cant wait for The Hobbit movie to come out(if it does).The Lord Of The Rings video games are just as great as the film series.I have only played this one but it surprised me very much.The third person view is great unlike most games of this sort which have you looking top-down like in Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2.The graphics in this game are simply amazing and so is the gameplay.There is plenty of great action in this game.Fans of the LOTR series should get this game.They wont regret it.I know I didn't.

9/10

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4 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
In twenty years, they still haven't equalled the Commodore 64 Tolkien games, 15 May 2005
Author: mentalcritic from Southern Hemisphere

Being a big fan of the Games Workshop tabletop battle game based upon the LOTR films (although they are rapidly veering back to Tolkien's novel), I had high hopes for a RTS title. I hoped that perhaps I could play socially with others who have an interest in Tolkien's mythological tour-de-force. Unfortunately, I cannot say this game has anything to recommend it. Once you get past the pretty videos (the unskippable introductions get very old very fast) and flashy graphics, there is very little to this game. Not only does it fail to improve upon the Tolkien games of the early 1980s, it also fails to put up even the most half-hearted challenge against the kings of the real time strategy genre, the early Command & Conquer series. Not surprisingly, EA Games also took over that series about the time the third episode was made, and promptly ran it into the ground.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. The one area where EA Games get it right, in contrast to their incredibly awful attempt to put LOTR into a Final Fantasy mould, is in how much they base upon the films. Unlike the narrow sliver of the Tolkien world that the films offered us, the game allows us to go almost anywhere East of Moria.

That's where the positives literally begin and end. For one thing, the game is astoundingly limited. They had all that space to use on a DVD-ROM, and they were only able to create two armies for each side? Given that the options are literally endless in other games that combine Tolkien with competitive combat, this is crook, indeed. The Free Peoples are basically given a choice between Rohan or Gondor, two armies that are almost entirely alike.

The Forces Of Darkness have slightly more varied armies in the forms of Mordor or Isengard, but their choices of heroes is so staggeringly limited as to be insulting. The fact that their so-called heavy units die faster than some of their regular infantry does not help. But I am digressing. I could rant and rave all night that failure to include Elves other than as an add-on for Rohan, or a Dwarf army of any description, makes the game incredibly limited. What really kills BFME, unfortunately, is the same thing that killed The Third Age: balance.

In a well-designed real-time strategy, every army has offensive and defensive options that allow the player to choose how they prosecute the war on their PC. Unfortunately, this is anything but the case in BFME. While Gondor can build archery towers or trebuchets around their outer walls to protect large castles, problems arise when the enemy brings catapults to bear against outposts. The only response other than dragging your army halfway across the map is to employ options that most strategists would save for more important occasions. The fact that structure upgrading often entails deliberately killing off units in order to attain the ability to build certain units doesn't help a lot, either.

Then there is the manner in which units will simply sit there like stunned mullets whilst their opponents fling arrows at them. What's even more insulting about this facet of the AI that EA stopped bragging about right after the game's release is that one army sitting at the bottom of a massive slope will fire up at another army at the top, who react is if they are out of range. When you order them to get up and fight back, they will even work further towards their attackers. Have the people who worked on the physics engine of BFME heard of this thing called gravity?

Quite frankly, with this imbalance killing everything that makes a game, single player or otherwise, fun, I cannot recommend BFME to anyone. Even after trying to start a player league by way of the IMDb boards for the corresponding films, my copy has now sat undusted in a shelf for months. I'm certain that companies like EA Games make the Tolkien estate absolutely rue the day the famed professor allowed the rights to his magnum opus to become so easily obtained.

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