LOTR: Battle for Middle-Earth 2 (X360)

Adam Wolf · 06-19-2006, 09:40 PM

IGN.com

By Douglass C. Perry
June 16, 2006 - Back in 1997 when I held the position of managing editor at Next Generation magazine, I used to watch our editor-in-chief Neil West play Warcraft 2. Watching somebody play a game could be the most boring thing ever, or it could be totally riveting. Watching Neil play was funny because he had a terrible knack for finding ways not to meet his deadline, which I was in charge of, even though he was my boss. But watching him play Warcraft 2 was like observing someone become addicted to drugs right in front of my eyes. I had been playing far too much Doom and Doom 2 on my PC, but didn't really like much else, until I brought that game home. Within an hour I felt the same thing I had watched happen to Neil. I was sucked into the fast-paced Dungeons and Dragons-style game and couldn't tear myself away from it. Warcraft 2 is still on my own personal top five list of greatest games.

That was nine years ago. And it's about time I switched it out for something else. Since then I've played about 1 million console games, and, for the life of me, I just haven't been able to get time in with PC games. That's why The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth 2 is such a great idea. Having played Goblin Commander and Aliens Vs. Predator: Extinction and even the rough-cut Starcraft for N64, the days of real-time strategies on consoles dried up long ago. The technology and the controls for all those games were either weak or not as good as they needed to be to garner enough support for the kind of excitement generated around PC RTS games. But EA, being the aggressive and market-savvy company that it is, has thrown its weight on this project, potentially setting the stage for this genre to explode on next-gen consoles.

The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth 2 isn't a terribly new game. It shipped to the PC in March. And it's not like the single-player game is any different than the PC version. So why the hell would this game be of any interest to an Xbox 360 owner? Um, hello Mr. N00b? It's Lord of the Rings, perhaps one of the most popular franchises in videogames now and for the foreseeable future. That and the online component are also potentially perfect for Xbox Live users. But none of this can happen unless the controls work. We'll not only discuss how they work, but we'll show you in IGN Weekly, where you'll see the game in high-res and watch us playing it. Early this week we played against EA in several Battle for Middle-earth 2 Xbox Live games, got a feel for the controls, and tested out three different Xbox Live online games.

Do the controls work? Yes. Are they the greatest thing since sliced bread? Well, no. Are they as good as the mouse and keyboard? No. But let's put things in perspective. First, Halo seems to work pretty damn well on the consoles, right? The issue of making first-person shooters on consoles isn't much of an issue anymore. In this unfinished preview build, which had a few kinks and wasn't complete and reviewable, the controls did, in fact, work well. I could easily say that this RTS controls better than any RTS on consoles. Given the competition, that's probably still not very convincing. The controls are different. I played about two hours of the game before jumping online and competing against three other guys. So I noticed some issues. But, if I had played through the single-player campaign and had grown accustomed to the controls, you know, after say eight or 10 hours, I'm sure I'd find that I could grow very deft at using them. Would the controls be better than the PC after acclimatizing to them after 10 hours? No, they wouldn't be directly better than the PC. But would they be good enough to get hooked? Oh, yes.

The commands, which we've talked about a few times before, use all of the Xbox 360 buttons and triggers, and the D-pad, too. The left analog controls the camera while the right one rotates the camera and zooms in and out. By pressing down on the left analog, L3, the camera zips to your base, and R3 instantly straightens out the camera to the default position. The analog sticks work relatively well at pinpointing any location on the map, and they're easy to get used to. Controlling armies is a slightly different story. To grab any single unit or all of your units on the screen, simply double tapping A grabs them all. What if you wanted to grab the whole army? By pressing the left trigger and double tapping A you'll grab the entire army. Pretty much all of the commands revolve around tapping A and another button. So EA's goal was to keep things simple and fast. To grab all units of a certain type, like say, all of the human Rangers, you'd press the left and right bumpers and press A. From a crowd of soldiers, pulling archers away from enemy cavalry is pretty important. Tapping B de-selects everything.

These are the basic controls. But Battle for Middle-earth 2 really revolves around mastering the shortcuts, mastering the heroes, and quickly making decisions to win a battle. The D-pad comes in handy in this respect, as does the shortcut bar. By pressing the D-pad in any of its four directions, you'll also quickly grab individuals and point them in the right direction. By pressing the D-pad up, you cycle through heroes, press it down and you'll cycle through builders. Cycle left and you'll get groups, and cycle right to grab spells. You can also create formations, which is key to winning this game; to create a formation, you simply select your army and Hold the A button. A formation grid appears onscreen and as you move the A button, various formations appear. Find one you like, let go, and the army will take its position. Like any game that provides players with this much control, knowing them, is, as they say, half the battle.

The other half is knowing the game. The multiplayer component in Battle for Middle-earth 2 is different than the PC version. It's been redesigned and built out for Xbox Live play. There are five modes of online play: Versus, King of the Hill, Capture and Hold, Resource Race, and Hero vs Hero. Versus is a traditional skirmish game, in which it's all against each other, or two players face off with two others. King of the Hill pits everyone against one another or two teams battle to gain and hold a central point for a certain amount of minutes. For instance, we played with the rule that you had to capture and hold a tree for six minutes straight. Capture and Hold is a variation of KOTH, but with multiple sites, making it more like Territories. Resource Race is a flat out race to compile a specified number of resources before the other team. Finally, Hero Vs. Hero pits all four players against one another with Heroes only. You have four Heroes and the goal is to destroy the enemy's fortress and competing heroes. The winner is the one who has either destroyed all of the other fortresses or gains the highest hero rating at the end of the match.

We played three of them, Versus, King of the Hill, and Hero Vs. Hero. When we played Versus, various strategies prevailed. There were four of us, each placed in a corner of a map (we played this one in Buckland). Most of us built up relatively decent armies and then tromped out to cause some damage. This worked OK. Using the humans, I was able to kill off some nasty little goblins, knock out their "farms," and generally weaken the closest enemy. I didn't know who it was, until they actually saw me, but once we engaged in a fight, the headsets were useful to call out some nasty little one-liners. But all of these strategies took a nose dive when Dan Adams swarmed and killed us all. He built up his elves to the maximum level, armed them with what looked like some kind of nasty fire storm, amassed a huge, unbeatable army, and slaughtered everyone mercilessly. It was a hell of a strategy. Actually, it was very basic. He maxed out the elves' arrows, constructed a solid cavalry, and used healing spells regularly. If any one of us knew he had played to the extent that he had (he reviewed the PC version), we would have given him a run for his money. I noticed a very interesting strategy that our EA counterpart used. He snuck into the corner of my territory and because he was an elf, created a tree (the equivalent of a farm). Thus, if his base was nearly wiped out, he could rely on the secret tree for resources, causing his opponents concern and dismay. Of course, I struck down his tree because it smelled greatly of elf, all high and mighty, like Elfish Zest. A little too clean for me.

King of the Hill is also about building stout armies and attacking with the right combinations. This was basically an army building race, too, only you have to hold the designated base for a certain amount of time. Our time was six minutes -- six minutes without giving up the base.

Hero Vs. Hero was the most eccentric mode we played. Here, you only have heroes. No armies, no farms or resources or building materials -- nothing but a citadel or base. You can call up four heroes with the goal of earning as many points as possible while also taking out enemy bases. For four players, the map seemed a little empty. There are lots of little stray enemies here and there you can kill for points, but defending your base while jumping onto the offense is key.

The Xbox Live interface enables players to play with as many as three others for a total of four players altogether in any match. You can jump into a Quick Match, Custom Match, or create your own match, with controls over game type, number of players, map, initial resources, command point factor, heroes, starting positions, and preferred army (which ranges from humans, elves, and dwarves on the good side, and goblins, Eisengard, and Mordor on the evil side). Another nice touch permits players to create a private match that's invite only. I'm pretty sure that will be one of the most used functions because it's always twice as fun playing with friends as it is with crazy Xbox Live lunatics. And crazy Xbox Live lunatics aren't a bad thing, they're just a preferred taste, you know, like Veggemite or Corn Oil. Sometimes you gotta have that stuff. (Especially if you're Australian.)

You know what I think? Methinks The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth 2 will take gamers by storm this summer. Once players get a hold of the controls, learn them, and dig into the Tolkien universe, EA's ingenious plan should open up the console world to RTS games. And hey, if it doesn't, who cares? We'll have a hell of a deep, engaging, and addictive real-time strategy on our hands. We can't wait.

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LOTR: Battle for Middle-Earth 2 (X360)

This is a discussion on LOTR: Battle for Middle-Earth 2 (X360) within the Video Games & Electronics forums, part of the Non Wrestling Forums category; IGN.com By Douglass C. Perry June 16, 2006 - Back in 1997 when I held the position of managing editor ...