Cavalry are excellent against infantry and archers, their charges sending stationary foot soldiers carving through the air and thudding violently onto the floor. But try charging headfirst into a well-organised group of pikemen, and you'll find horse kebab on special at most local taverns before the day's out.
Archers are nippy and great at range, but virtually useless up close, while infantry can wipe out a group of pikemen without suffering many losses. Believe me, just throwing all your men into battle and hoping they beat the Al won't get you very far here.
The sheer scope of some of the battles is immense, with scores or even hundreds of troops clashing at once. In fact, with the exception of Rome: Total War, there are few other RTS games which come even close to achieving the sheer brutality and believability of virtual warfare as TBFME, though some of the sieges, such as Helm's Deep, could have done with being a little larger in scale. What's more, with each level also featuring at least one of your favourite heroes from the films to lead your troops into battle see I Can Be Your Hero, Baby', , you've got a formula for some of the most captivating battle scenes ever found in an RTS.
And what of the units, which have been lovingly recreated from the films? Watching a sea of charging cavalry is an awesome sight, their hooves kicking up dust and rumbling like thunder as they gallop at the enemy before hitting them like a tidal wave.
Uruk-Hai pikemen march with spears, roaring gutturally and lowering their giant toothpicks at an angle to impale advancing foes, while their crossbow-toting counterparts can upgrade their projectiles with fire. Cave trolls lumber around dumbly, picking up felled tree trunks and scattering their opponents with fierce swipes, while Balrogs are immense beasts of fire and shadow that can take to the air and call upon an array of arcane powers.
And let's not forget the graceful multi-talented elves who can become invisible in woods and fire their projectiles devastatingly far, or the gigantic Oliphonts giant elephants with their spike-covered tusks.
Best of all though are the Ents. Slow and cumbersome but powerful, these walking trees can kill dozens of enemies with one giant kick or slap, and should they come into contact with fire, run manically with arms flailing to the nearest water source to douse themselves.
The Battle For Middle-Earth is simply spilling over with attention to detail, making it one of the most charming and charismatic strategy games ever created. Zoom into the breathtaking visuals and you'll find Uruks being pulled out of Uruk Pits in muddy jackets, cows being herded into slaughterhouses and coming out the other side as giant slabs of meat and farmers tilling the land on farms. The presentation is almost above reproach though sometimes units can act somewhat erratically , and coupled with the spine-tingling soundtrack lifted straight from the films, the whole package becomes a mesmensing ride of highs, lows and numerous thrills, with the odd frustration thrown in for good or should that be bad measure.
Without question, The Battle For Middle-Earth is a triumph, a game which not only manages to unite the mainstream and hardcore markets, but one which sets new standards in presentation and polish. Despite its innovations, it's accessible enough for casual gamers to master in minutes, yet it still manages to cram in just about enough strategic depth to seduce you if you're a hardcore strategist. Sure, sometimes it can get a tad repetitive, sometimes levels can be a bit of a slog or sometimes a little too easy for RTS veterans , but mainly, this is a thrilling, beautifully-imagined piece of programming that does the films proud.
Even if you're not a fan of the trilogy, you shouldn't hesitate in checking this out, though you'll undoubtedly get more out of it if you watch the films first. Apart from units, heroes, buildings, storyline, missions and resources, what else is different between playing as either Good and Evil?
Funny you should ask, because both sides possess two equally powerful, though very different super weapons, which gain in power as each campaign progresses. The foul forces of Isengard and Mordor can call upon the Power of the One Ring, which among a host of other dark powers, enables you to mat the earth with vines that entwine around enemy troops to slow their progress, and summon Balrogs.
To counter the Ring, the armies of Rohan, Gondor and The Fellowship have access to the Evenstar, which enables you to heal your men and summon huge, near-invincible armies of Oathbreakers undead warriors to bolster your forces. We've said it before, but The Battle For Middle-earth is something of a dream ticket for real-time strategy fans. The design talent of team Westwood, the mega-budgets of EA, the production values of a Hollywood studio and the licence to the most spectacular cinematic trilogy since Police Academy 4 through to 6.
Up till now, the only possible objection has arisen from the looming shadow of an even greater strategy presence, the toga-clad bulk of Rome: Total War that, and the non-involvement of Steve Guttenberg.
But forget all that. The comparisons are now utterly redundant, as what we saw at E3 has proven that EA is taking a very different direction with its trilogy-spanning title. Where Activision's Rome is aiming for maximum scale, TBFME is aiming for maximum emotion, with an emphasis on fleshing out the little details that change a battlefield simulation into a true cinematic spectacle.
We're adding a lot of emotion to the game to bring the characters and the world to life. By way of illustration, Mark fires up the latest in-game demos, showing off the actions and behaviour of a few different units on the battlefield. First up is an elephantine Muma, carrying a saddle-load of black-clad archers into a Gondorian village. The big bugger starts off simply lumbering towards its foes, swinging its trunk chains like a scythe.
It's impressive enough as is. Rearing up on its hind legs, the dumb beast roars in panic, then tries to run away as the flames attack its hindquarters.
Thrashing about like a cornered badger, the creature lays waste to several nearby buildings before dropping dead with a reluctant thump. It's an Oscar-winning performance, and one that wouldn't look out of place in a Peter Jackson action reel. If anything, the sentient creatures are even more impressive. When Treebeard gets set on fire by a gaggle of orc archers, he runs, unbidden, into a nearby stream to douse himself before returning to swing some angry wood.
Humans, meanwhile, can be seen jeering and tensing for combat whenever an enemy comes near, celebrating with cheers and sword thrusts after a victory, and cowering in trepidation before a monstrous troll. Forget your tokenistic idle animations like press-ups or puffing a fag - this is the new way of doing things, and it's damn impressive. We want to give you the feeling of being behind the walls at Helm's Deep, looking out and seeing all the orcs and thinking 'we're doomed'.
Getting the emotion system in there is going to be one of those things that makes you look back at every other RTS and think 'something's missing here'.
Owing to the size of the battles, the designers have had to rethink everything from troop creation up. So, rather than clicking to create a single unit, you now click to create an entire squad of troops, the size determined by the unit's natural disposition.
Archers are currently set at around ten per group, while orcs are in the realm of You also have the choice of two or three formation shapes -wedge, square, bunny rabbit - for some of these groups, though on the evil side things are more or less chaotic.
However, grouping units is just one measure the team has come up with to tidy up the battlefield; the other is somewhat farther-reaching and potentially far more interesting. When you have two giant armies coming together, you can set lines for your troops to stick to, enabling them to move forward in a nice wave.
The ones in the front meet the fight, the ones at the back wait and then it breaks up into pods as the battle progresses. For a start, harvesting and gathering are gone, history, caput, deemed inappropriate for the Tolkien universe. As such, much of the resource collection now takes place in the walls of your base, be it through farms for the tree-loving humans or slaughterhouses for the savage orcs. In addition, gold is set to be dropped by the dead in RPG fashion.
To compensate for this simplification, it's been made much more difficult to upgrade as you climb the tech tree. For example, if you gain access to fire arrows in the middle of a battle, you can't simpiy upgrade all your existing archers to fire archers; but nor do you need to build a whole new set of fire-wielding troops. Instead, you have to send a cart laden with fire arrows out to meet your army on the battlefield, and only when it reaches them can they upgrade.
Clearly, enemy supply carts are set to become a natural target in the same way enemy harvesters once were, though with far more satisfying tactical implications. There are other new features we could talk about - the radical new interface, the streamlined base building - but in every case the aims remain the same. First, to make the game true to the Lord Of The Rings cinema: and second, to make it more fun. And this, after all, is what Westwood is best at. After the three epic masterpieces that were the Lord Of The Rings films, it's somewhat baffling that we've yet to see the release of a PC-only game based around Peter Jackson's trilogy.
We caught up with Mark Skaggs, executive producer on The Battle For Middle-Earth, and grilled him for information about the game like a Hobbit would a pack of juicy sausages. The first piece of good news is that you'll be able to command both the forces of good and evil, with each campaign's plot unfolding through video sequences that introduce each mission's background story. For the good side, you get to control the Gondor and Rohan armies as well as the heroes of the Fellowship.
Your goal is to defeat the evil armies across Middle-earth. This includes fighting all the major battles you see in the three films plus a few more, says Skaggs. For the evil side, you get to control the armies of Isengard and Mordor and you have to get the ring from Frodo and conquer Middle-earth. Gone are the cumbersome hours of harvesting materials in pre-defined resource fields, replaced by what could be a far more intuitive and less time-consuming system.
As Skaggs explains:When you play as one of the good armies, you get food from the farms you build and iron from blacksmiths. You also get treasure from some of the monsters you kill in battles. These resources go into a pool that you use up when you build troops and structures.
Playing as Isengard or Mordor should see a similar system for resource gathering, only this time you amass raw materials via slaughterhouses food and furnaces iron.
However, as Skaggs explains, there will be one major difference between the two sides' resource collecting abilities. When playing as Isengard, you're able to get wood from cutting down trees. We put this in because it felt in line with what Isengard did in the movies. We're not allowing the good armies to do this though, because it just feels wrong having them destroying the forests of Middle-earth. Quite right too. Base building is also receiving a major overhaul.
We're moving to a Camps and Castles' type of base-building system, where each side will have a camp or castle area with pre-determined build plots where they can construct various buildings. By simplifying the process of building bases, we allow players to get to the fun part of producing units and fighting more quickly. It also allows us to tailor the look of the bases to fit the rich fiction of Middle-earth.
Early playtests have shown that players think this new way of building bases works really well, states Skaggs. We're also moving away from the traditional tech tree concept you've seen in previous RTS games. Instead, we're adding the concept of Building Veterancy. Each level of Veterancy brings with it more units and more defensive strengths. Tigokanitingtom 0 point. I downloaded the base game and an error message comes up saying that the file cannot be extracted, anyone know how to fix this?
Vala 2 points. Hey guys, i managed to get this and the lich king expansion installed, i can play the lich king expansion but when i try and play the base game, it shows the splash screen, i see the ring icon in my task bar, and then after a few minutes with my cursor loading it just closes?
Anyone got any ideas? Lo Lo 0 point. John the greek -2 points. GameTime points. Ambrotos 0 point. Great game! Big Thanks myabandonware! Delete my last comment: the answer is you go to the tutorial up there and download that DAT file it mentions, get's around it.
This is why i should not impulse post grumble. Veterans, however won't have any problems with the campaign. When everything starts kicking in--the controller shortcuts, unit abilities and weaknesses, what buildings produce what, etc.
The battles don't take place on generic tiled landscapes. Rather, each campaign mission plays out in wonderfully designed stages created specifically to capture your imagination: Cities shine with waterfalls and statues, docks bum from naval bombardment, and the fortress of Dol Guldur intimidates with its skyscraping towers and obsidian walls. The different factions Isengard, elves, goblins, etc. And the corpses should be piling up plenty on Xbox Live: Multiplayer offers lots of maps, a couple of first-person shooter-influenced modes see sidebar , and generally smooth play fit only crashed on us once during our playtesting , though the four-player cap and inability to team up against CPU opponents kinda stinks of dwarf breath.
Though Patrick may feel otherwise, I gotta say I think EA did a commendable job adapting the complicated controls of this keyboard-first game to the tight quarters of the controller. In mere minutes I was managing resources and calling out orders with ease. So it wasn't the controls that made this game hard to play--it was the resolution.
Icons, percentage numbers, and other onscreen displays are tiny, which leads to big frustration when you're trying to set up your base. This also has an effect on your ability to distinguish who's who among your units--expect a lot of zooming in to make sure you've selected the archers, not the swordsmen, and zooming out to issue the attack or new position command.
But I do love that, instead of pushing you through the narrative of the books and movies again , the campaign parallels those events by focusing on the obscure War to the North, explaining why the elves and dwarves were missing in action--a treat for any Tolkien nerd.
With BFME2, EA makes a noble effort to buck this trend with the controller, but the game has way too much to do and not enough buttons to work with sony, Jay. BFME2's Xbox-level graphics also hurt, and the entertaining, Risk-esque War of the Ring mode from the PC version is gone, so single-player just isn't as fulfilling though I can't say I miss that mode's dull multiplayer variant.
But while the solo campaigns offer familiar RTS missions, the game presents them with a very solid eye for the Tolkien feel--what can I say, it's fun to crush Rivendell. Also, multiplayer features a nice slew of achievement-friendly Live modes, which play into the best reason to get this version: to have an achievement list that reads like Gandalfs resume.
The Lord of the Rings is one of those franchises that you can't help but think of in videogame terms. Fun to a degree? Sure, but it left many fans disappointed in the midst of the flourishing movie franchise. Battle for Middle-earth II, unlike its predecessor, does most everything right. It takes a beloved franchise rife with potentially great videogames moments and transforms it into a fleshed out, fully formed RTS experience.
Half of what makes for a solid RTS, for example, is a rich world to draw upon, and that's something Battle for Middle-earth II certainly doesn't want for. The missions are well crafted both objective-wise and setting-wise, utilizing the vast lore of The Lord of the Rings books to make more some really memorable experiences.
The logistics of the game are all pretty sharp, too. Battles feel truly epic, with hundreds of characters on screen at once, and better yet, the chaos feels controlled though always intense. The emphasis is squarely on the action, with a plethora of units and heroes similar to the Warcraft series at your command.
But, with such an emphasis on action, the strategic element of the game runs in the shallow end. For RTS purists, that can be a bit of a downer, but for the more mainstream audience that doesn't usually delve into heavy strategic games, this is a pretty big boon. Strategy enthusiasts aren't left completely in the dark, however.
It's a bit rough around the edges, but if you prefer a little bit more depth mingled with your action, it's definitely a fun diversion from the main game. And, if nothing else, Battle for Middle-earth II sure does look nice. The scope of the game is pretty huge, and with battles fielding a huge number of units, it'll induce a few moments of nerdish awe. But, like most RTS titles, it looks really nice far away, but when you start zooming in, all the flaws shine through.
This would be a negligible if it weren't for the fact that a majority of the cinematic use in-game graphics, highlighting many of the game's imperfections. It helps all the more if you can recognize the subtle genius in zerging an enemy base with a battalion of LothlA?
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