14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
Live the movies
Date of Review: Jan 12, 2005
The Bottom Line: One of the best RTS games... Period.
I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore gamer but I know a good game when I see one. I first heard about this game from a hallmate at school and before we knew it we were watching clips of Battle for Middle Earth on the EA Games website. I was shocked at how beautiful the artwork was and how the details make the game literally come alive. I knew immediately that this game was different than any other RTS (real time strategy)game on the market.
I was originally a believer of Starcraft. I played that for years and never got tired of it. But Starcraft, being as old as it is, was doomed to lose a hold of me eventually. The amount of detail and work put into Battle for Middle Earth is evident in the graphics and gameplay. For example you have 360 degree vision and zoom. The level of strategy and effects that can be applied is endless. Each unit has a psychological effect. Previously, a unit just standing there would stand there and wait for your command. In BFME, after winning a battle, the units are celebrating. Or Ents and Mumakils, when caught on fire, begin to panic and lose control, somtimes running over soldiers and stomping other units around. This game allows you to select as many units as you want, instead of having a maximum of 12 like in Blizzard's Starcraft. And of course you have the ability to group your units. The palantir is different in this game than from any other RTS game. It is on the bottom left corner and consists of a circle with a small window that extrudes from it that gives details of selected units. One unique thing about this game is that you gain powers from battling. Everytime you complete a circle, you gain one power point and you can spend it on certain powers. Purchased powers are then lined up on the left side of the screen and you click to activate. A few examples of powers include summoning the army of the dead, summoning balrog, heal, changing the terrain, etc. Good and bad forces each have their different powers. One thing about the units is that they can level up as well as the buildings.
This game is built around the movies by director Peter Jackson. There are two campaigns: good and bad, each with three different difficulty levels. The campaigns follows the movies directly. Even if you saw the movies and you know whats going to happen, you experience it firsthand and it is still awesome. One particualer part of The Lord of the Rings struck me. It was the battle scene in The Two Towers. I remember it as one of the most cinematically amazing war scenes that I have ever seen. In BFME, you control the war and you are fighting it. The experience is simply thrilling. You know what is going to happen and you've seen it in the movies before, but it doesn't matter. You are living it. The campaigns follow the movie so directly that there are clips that show in the palintir window when something triggers in the game that happens in the movie.
The graphics are unrealistically real. The water flow in the maps seem like you're watching a body of water from a real orbiting camera around the earth. The terrain and everything in it are life-like. For example, the trees move in the breeze and the thunderstorms are so convincing that if you had a nice sound system you'll find yourself jumping.
One thing that I didn't like too much about this game is that you have to build in a specified building foundation. You can't just build anywhere you see fit. You have to buy a camp site or settlement and then build on the specified foundations. That is one negative thing that I have found.
All of the races, two good (Rohan and Gondor) and two evil (Mordor and Isengard), seem to be well-balanced. Of course this can and will change as new strategies will be applied in the future. Online play is just as good as the campaign. There is the option to play a quick match, which is used to rank players. Quick matches can be 1v1 or 2v2. The good thing about online play in BFME is that if your teammate drops, you can control his units and base. There are also custom matches which include everything that one would expect in an online RTS game. Of course there are chatrooms.
The system requirements for BFME are a bit high and require a newer system. I run mine on a 768MB RAM, 80 GB of hard drive space, an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card, and 2.8 GHz. Even with all of my orignal settings upgraded, it runs a little slow at times on my machine. It is recommended that you play this on a much higher setting. I set my graphics to ultra high on the game menu. It was previously at a much lower one and running much smoother but the graphics are one of the great things about this game. So I sacrifice a little performance for graphics.
Actual system requirements:
OS: Windows XP or 2000
CPU: 1.3 GHz or faster
RAM: 256 MB
Disc Drive: 8x or faster CD/DVD Drive
Hard Drive: 4 GB or more free space
Video: DirectX 9.0b compatible
Sound: DirectX 9.0b compatible
Input: Keyboard and mouse
Video card with 32 MB or more memory and one of these chipsets is required: NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS or greater ATI Radeon 7500 or greater.
I paid $49.95 for this and free shipping at eagames.com
