This expansion adds a new faction, new heroes and some other interesting gameplay tweaks which makes BFME 2 better
But EA proved them wrong and brought out BFME 2. It had new factions, more heroes and a decent campaign. The best part of these LOTR games is the unique abilities of the heroes. As the army size is limited, micro managing is not too tough. Instead, you can focus more on levelling up your hero characters and using their special abilities to turn the tides of battles.
While BFME 2 was a good game, it exhausted any story line that could relate to the movies. However, J.R.R Tolkien's Middle Earth is a huge world, and it had many heroes and battles that were still left to be digitally immortalized.
Thus The Witch King, who was actually killed by Eowyn in the "Return of The King" movie is featured in this expansion. While the movie showed the fall of the witch king, this game shows the rise. It is loosely based on events touched, but not elaborated in Tolkien's classic. The new faction Angmar is a unified race that waged battle against mankind.
Angmar's special units are spell casting priests, which is a new thing. All other factions have direct battle units whereas the priests can be viewed mostly as support units.
Apart from introducing the new faction, the existing factions also received a few heroes; most notably the dwarves whom were painfully lacking in heroes and also mordor and Isengard also got their own share of new heroes. Apart from that, the custom hero feature has been enhanced to some extent, albeit still far, far away from being anything even nearly close to the create a character modes usually present in fighting and wrestling games. If there's another LOTR RTS game, EA should definitely work in this area.
The game still uses an upgraded engine the now "quite old" C&C: Generals game. Still, the game looks really nice and detailed in Ultra settings. However, the environments are pretty, but non-interactive to a great extent. You can see dogs and other stray animals moving around, but no matter how fierce the battle is, nothing seems to scare them away. And characters often get stuck and it gets a bit confusing when many different types of characters are seen together in the battlefield; the movement of the characters become awkward and they don't seem to respond to mouse clicks; i.e. no matter how much you want them to attack the tower, they keep on fighting off nearby assailants instead.
The single player AI is very cheap and stupidly predictable. In skirmish matches, the only thing they do is build up a small to medium army, come to your base, and start attacking all your resource buildings. As soon as one farm is destroyed, they move on to another. No matter how much you attack them, they won't attack back. They would keep on demolishing the building. It is highly annoying, as you can't actually concentrate much on anything other then defending the resource buildings at the beginning of the match. After fending off the pestering enemies, when you go out and start fighting back, they will retaliate with siege weapons.
If you have read the GS review, you will know how crucial (read cheap) siege weapons are in this game. No matter how majestic or robust your opponents (and yours) castle and the surrounding defences are, it won't take more than 2/3 rounds of catapult barrage to demolish them. If you are playing as Men of the west, all you need to do is build 5-10 catapults, Eomer and the Theoden King, 3-4 legions of Rohirrims, 2 groups of fire archers and you can simply win the match by protecting the siege weapons and continually firing at the buildings.
It sounds easy, but it actually is tougher than that. The campaign is okay; and I don't think anyone would play it twice. If you don't have a fast internet connection, you will stuck with the skirmishes. The maps are well detailed, and there are plenty of them. Most recognizable locations from Tolkien's world and the movies are present; with additional new maps. However, AI issues are so prevalent that even the most dedicated LOTR fans will also lose interest after a while.
With a few factions, you can mix and match different types of units and create an interestingly assorted army. But as I have already said, the AI is very cheap. If you bring in some archers and pikemen, the horse units will simply ignore the pikemen and keep on attacking the archers. Also, they will always bring counter units to your favorite/most preferred unit.
There is a difference between cheap and challenging AI. Due to the immense popularity of multiplay in RTS games, it seems that game developers are becoming less interested in designing a challenging single player AI.
As a nice tribute to the LOTR franchise, the game gets an 8. But AI issues can break this game.