Battle for middle earth 2 review

jrr tolkien's saga goes on, the second installment in the "battle for middle earth" series is out.while the first game followed the plot of the movies and only showed those places that were shown in the movies, the game is closely realted to the book and most of the stuff in the game isn't from the movies at all, the game follows the allegiance between the men, the dwarves and the elves in an attempt to stop the advancing forces of sauron.there are 3 modes in the single player-the campaign mode-including the good and the evil mode;the war of the ring mode which is like risk and rome total war, its a turn based mode where all you have to do is to take decisions and move your armies over a map of middle earth, and finally the skirmish mode which is spread over all parts of middle earth.you also have the option of creating you own hero with unique abilities, you can use your hero in skirmish mode.

the good campaign has maps from the grey havens,rivendell,the dwarven kingdoms to mirkwood and celduin, and you get to play as men with all the characters of men featured in the book and movies with newer characters like the dunedain, as elves with new characters like haldir and glorfindel, u'll also find elrond and arwen here, and finally as the 3 foot tall dwarves with new charcters like the dwarven king dain and gloin, all of these are featured exclusively in the books.
the evil campaign has civilisation like mordor,isengard and goblins, u'll see completely new heroes like sauron himself,dragons,giant worms,orc kings...., one of the best misiions in the game is the last one for the evil campaign, where the last alliance in formed at rivendell and sauron himself come out to batlle, its very cinematic. each civilisation has its own buildings and units,upgrades and abilities, one thing to notice here is the resource bulidings-you can't build them close to each other, you have to build them far apart fot maximum output.
one of the best things i like about this game is the way units are made, in most of the strategy games units are made one by one, but in this game you can create batallions of untis, which saves a lot of effort and time.
one thing you will notice in the skirmish mode is that as you keep winning your level keeps going up, and you become musch stronger, this makes the skirmish mode very intersting especially with the numerous maps middle earth, you can play in.
the AI is good and balanced, the enemies are hard to beat at medium settings, especially in the skirmish mode as they continously attack you, disrupting yor resource gathering,one prob. is when you postion your archers on top of a garrison or wall to attak on the enemies below, they have a habit of leaving their positions and running after the enmeies even though the enemies are withinn their firing range, apart from this there are no other probs.
the graphics engine is also updated and the game looks stunning the special effects like the effect when you can unleash a crushing wave of water on your enemies(much like arwen did in the 1st movie), and calling upon a barrage of flames look simply mind blowing, you see the bodies of men flying round as troll swing at them...., it sounds awsome too, the actors from the movies have provided the voices, so the orcs's grunts and the gondor soldiers rally calls all sound brilliant, also noteworthy are the cinematic animation sequences they are a brilliant mixture of art and cut scenes,narrated by elrond(of matrix's agents smitth fame).
i have played many RTS titles from the age of empires series, rise of nations to the command and conquer series,empire earth, and i can tell you this is one of the best ones, once you start this game its really hard to get up before finishing up all the missions, even after you have completed the campaign you will find your self engrossed in the skirmish mode, this game is really very addictive and immersive, i mean it!, so the final verdict whether you have seen/read lord of the rings before or not,play this game its a very immersive,cinematic and amazing piece of coding(read as a game).

pros-stunning graphics and sound, heroes and places not seen before in the movies, immersive
cons-hogs 6 gb hard disk place, maybe the gameplay is a bit short,but maybe i am saying this cuz the games so bloody addictive!
rating-9/10.