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				Graphics: 8.5 Gameplay: 8.0 Sound: 9.5 Control: 8.5 Replay Value: 9.5 Live play: 9.5 Rating: 8.5 Publisher:  Electronic Arts Developer:  Electronic Arts Number Of Players:  1 (1-4) Online Screenshots
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  I will be the first to admit that I have been an anti-real-time-strategy, anti-role-playing-game snob. As far as I was concerned, people who played games like World of Warcraft, Age of Empires and Final Fantasy were impossibly dweeby. Why, in high school they probably skulked around in black trench coats with several multi-sided die in their pockets. (Okay, I was a band geek in high school, but that’s TOTALLY different.)

  In addition, most of these games were best played on a PC, and I opted out of the PC gaming arms race a long time ago. What might be good enough for gaming today will be dumpster bait in six months, especially if you prefer to use a hard-to-upgrade laptop.

  So it was with trepidation that I obtained a copy of Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II for the Xbox 360. Would I be able to pick up and play a geeky RTS based on Tolkien’s already geeky material? Was I capable of dealing with concepts like “command points” and “palantirs”?

  LOTR is not likely to convert non-RTS fans to a lifelong love of the genre, but it is designed to ease console gamers into the world of building things and moving tiny soldiers around a map. It accomplishes this without dumbing down and disappointing the hard-core RTS enthusiasts.

  Not intuitive, but not impossible

  Because EA purchased the rights to both the Tolkien library and the Lord of the Rings movies, it has access to the entirety of Tolkien’s middle-earth lore. As such, the game does not directly follow the events of the Rings trilogy but does feature races, characters and places from Tolkien’s world.

  This console iteration of LOTR is not a game that even seasoned PC RTS vets can pick up and play. The controller learning curve is steep but doable, especially with the aid of the in-game tutorials. (My rental copy of the game lacks even the basic manual, but I’m told the manual is inadequate, making an expensive third-party guide a tempting purchase.)

  For those not familiar with real-time strategy games, LOTR is all about building, controlling and defending resources using military might. The keys to the game include having a good balance of soldier types -- since each class has its own strengths and weaknesses against different types of enemies -- and knowing where and when to move them.

  Your resources are limited and consist of money and command points. Building structures and training military units use some of both. Certain structures constantly earn money and are a wise investment. Command points, on the other hand, don’t accumulate the way money does, but some structures increase the number of available command points, enabling you to have a larger army.

  LOTR is not for casual players; its depth can be intimidating for those not accustomed to RTS games. Enthusiasts have written entire online tutorials advising on how to deploy and maneuver troops.

  Single-player game modes include good and evil campaigns, which consist of a series of objective-based missions of increasing difficulty, and a non-directed “skirmish” mode played against AI. The economics of building structures, accumulating resources and raising and deploying armies are present in every mode.

  Learning the controls: more than half the battle

  It’s clear that a mouse and keyboard are still the ideal controls for a game like this, which requires scrolling across a map quickly, selecting soldiers and moving them into position. But EA has done as well as can be expected with the limitations of a console controller.

  The right trigger is the key to controlling the game. It expands the “palantir,” which is the graphical menu in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. The D-pad then navigates through the menu, which allows you access to your builders, your heros and your “powers,” which are your spells. You can even create bookmarks and get access to them through the palantir. (You Tolkien buffs will recall that the “palantir” in the books was a mystical object allowing the user to see far away people and events.)

  There are controller shortcuts that allow you to select all the soldiers on the map, all the soldiers on your screen, just certain types of soldiers, etc. You can also use the left thumbstick to return to your home base quickly and the “Y” button to zoom to the latest mission objective (in single-player games).

  But with a game that requires almost constant juggling of resources and sometimes monitoring of two different parts of the map at a time, the controller has the potential to get extremely frustrating. After the third time trying to guide my troops into battle only to discover key units still cooling their heels in another part of the map, I almost threw my controller into the TV. (Luckily, the game allows you to save at any point and also creates auto-saves at the ends of missions.)

  Simply put, a console controller just doesn’t allow for the kind of “micromanagement,” as the cool RTS kids put it, that a mouse would. I gave up pretty early on using any sort of finesse in directing particular troop types into battle; instead, my approach has been to build a good variety of as many soldiers as I can afford and try to overwhelm enemy forces with brute strength. It’s a strategy that’s not always successful.

  Graphics: As good as they need to be

  Since most of LOTR involves a top-down view on teeny characters, graphics are perhaps not as critical as they would be in another kind of game. Nevertheless, LOTR is a pretty game. Menus and introductory scenes are the visual highlight of the game, especially those points at which computer graphics morph into concept art and vice versa. The game simply looks classy.

  And let’s face it – there’s nothing more fun than a battalion of tiny men who idly fidget and swing their swords and then snap to attention when you click on them. I also dare even the most hard-core RTS’er not to laugh out loud the first time Tom Bombadil makes a magical appearance during the “good” campaign to dance around and kick some goblin ass.

  The most annoying graphical flaw is the maddening inability to zoom out enough to see the entire play area. This results in a kind of tunnel vision that forces you to hop from one part of the map to another to monitor all your troops and installations. It’s easy to lose entire military units on the map without a better overview. A tiny representation of your map is in the palantir, but it’s extremely difficult to use it for navigation. Shadows are also weirdly pixellated.

  Frame rate problems are minimal, occurring mostly when moving quickly to a new part of the map. Things seem to smooth out once that part of the map is cached.

  Sound

  The background music (straight from the movies, from what I’ve read) and voice acting give the game an appropriately epic feel. Dwarves sound hardy and cheerful, elves sound heroic, and the goblins and spider-riders hiss and screech to convey pure evil. (During the “good” campaign, the Elven narrator sounds eerily like the late Graham Chapman of Monty Python. I often found myself bellowing in response, “Brother Maynard! Bring up the Holy Hand Grenade!”) Hugo Weaving, who played Elrond in the movies, even makes a voiceover appearance.

  The Dolby 5.1 surround offers a bit of gameplay assistance as well; sometimes an exclamation from “behind” you gives you a clue that there’s action that needs your attention in another part of the map. However, if your cursor gets too far from the action, you won’t hear it at all.

  Crushing your friends’ tiny armies

  LOTR offers several ways to play against friends in real time over Live. Gametypes range from long strategic battles, where the object is to destroy your enemies’ troops and means of replenishment, to territory games like King of the Hill. During a recent skirmish against three friends, it was amusing to hear nothing but breathing over the headset as each player concentrated on quickly erecting buildings and raising armies. The silence was broken only by my newbie questions and, later, the cursing of one of my opponents as another one moved his troops in.

  While some games can be time-limited, it’s not inconceivable that a strategic game involving strong players could go on for several hours. Even after being eliminated, serious LOTR addicts can continue to watch the remaining players and even hear, though not participate in, their conversation.

  An early annoyance: EA forces players to use its proprietary servers, and a bug recently made it impossible to join the servers without first backing out of Live and then reconnecting. The bug was recently patched.

  The bottom line

  Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II provides RTS fans a console-based outlet for this genre, but it’s not clear that it’ll draw many console gamers into this game type if they weren’t RTS enthusiasts already.

  However, with its careful design and thoughtful adaptation to console controls, EA certainly has given other RTS designers with console ambitions something to emulate.

7/18/2006  Tracey 'Jerri Blank' McCartney