A great feel, but a bit choppy when it comes to the graphics and the AI

User Rating: 7 | The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth PC
1. Gameplay - This game is one hell of a way to be reliving the Peter Jackson movie. You can play as one of the 4 kingdoms - Rohan, Gondor, Isengard and Mordor. Yes you heard me right, Mordor. Here you can play as either the good guys and play out the game more or less the way the movie (and even the book plays it), or you can play the bad guys and bring death and destruction to all of middle earth. Either way, you can command a vast horde of soldiers (or orcs) and siege machines and cavalry to lay waste to your opponent. The resource collection is replaced by certain strategic points that have to be captured, built and protected for collection of resource. You are also provided with a base that you can use for building barracks, etc and some minor defensive structures. However, the number of buildings that you can build in your base is limited, so to expand, you need to look out for other empty bases, or destroy an enemy base and capture it for yourself. If your enemy is walled behind a citadel, you will be needing massive siege weapons to tear down their gates or scale their walls. Finally whether you play as good or evil, you are provided with a lot of special powers. For the good forces, it is the power of the Evenstar, while the forces of evil have the one ring's power with them. Each of these powers grant you power, ranging from increasing the health of the heroes to summoning the army of the dead to summoning a Balrog (for the forces of evil). However, the game soon loses its charm as it becomes overly repetitive. The poor AI doesn't help either. You can use the same strategy over and over again to decimate the enemy without provoking a second thought from them. They will keep repeating the mistakes without learning from them. The game finally boils down to finding out a single method to exploit the loopholes in the enemy AI and repeat it for the entire campaign.

2. Story - The story is more or less similar to the Peter Jackson movie with a few bold changes. Like Gandalf defeats the Balrog and continues his journey with the rest. Boromir lives to fight alongside the fellowship. A lot of other quirky inconsistencies between the movie and the game make the game a bit hard to believe. However, despite the inconsistencies, the game is as perfect as the movie is in terms of experience and feel.

3. Graphics - Oh dear God! The graphics is really ---- bad. There has not been another uglier game created in that time alongside it. The poor graphics and incompatibility with the modern graphics systems, makes the game feel like one from 1997. Real cheap graphics is the biggest drawback of the game

4. Sound and Music - The voice acting is well --- superb. The actors from the movie reprise the voice of the characters and outperform themselves in terms of the voice acting. Specially the voice overs from Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee as Gandalf and Saruman are outstanding. One of the best points in the game.

All over it is a good game with terrific voice acting and outstanding gameplay marred by poor and cheap graphics quality.