The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth Updated Hands-On - Multiplayer Impressions

Historically, most real-time strategy games pretty much went something like this: collect resources, build up a base, and win the game by recruiting a game-winning, opponent-crushing army first. A lot has changed in recent years, thanks to the Command & Conquer series, which was among the first to emphasize fast-paced, offense-minded strategy over spending the first part of a game session on less-than-exciting tasks like mining gold and chopping wood. The creators of some of the most popular games in this series are now putting the finishing touches on EA LA's The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth. According to designer Mark Skaggs, the game's single-player campaign, which takes place in the sprawling fantasy realm of the award-winning The Lord of the Rings motion pictures, will "attempt to tell a story in the The Lord of the Rings universe using real-time strategy as a venue." However, as we found out firsthand, it will also be a brutal and unpredictable multiplayer game in which one last-second decision can seemingly turn the tide of battle at practically any moment. (Hint: This can actually work against you if you're playing against the company that created the game). Read our impressions here, and be sure to watch the latest exclusive "what if?" trailer, along with all-new gameplay movies.

You can expect fierce multiplayer battles from this upcoming strategy game.

If you've been following the game's progress so far, you'll know that it features four playable factions, each with its own set of military units, special powers, and "hero" units. These are: the noble defenders of Gondor; the uruk-hai legions of Isengard, domain of Saruman the White; the nomadic riders of Rohan; and the orc hordes of Mordor led by Sauron himself, whose fearsome gaze can be used as an actual weapon in the game. It's true that some of the sides share a few common units (for instance, the mighty wizard Gandalf has been known to come to the aid of both Rohan and Gondor), many of which are arranged in grouped companies, rather than as single units to micromanage. Still, each of the four sides seems to follow completely different strategies that appear to be in line with their roles in the motion pictures--it doesn't hurt matters that the game uses unit portraits and voice samples that come right out of the movies, either.

And the four different factions should collectively provide at least one good choice for most any real-time strategy fan, which will even provide surprising variety in and of themselves, because the four factions each not only have different heroes, but also different "special powers" that can have minor effects or dire consequences. You'll earn "battle points," which you'll obtain by defeating your enemies and destroying their structures. You can then use these points to purchase various powers from a branching tree of special powers, which grow successively stronger until you unlock each side's most expensive and most devastating power, such as Mordor's summoning of the dreaded balrog demon. In addition, the game doesn't have a traditional "technology tree." Yes, you start the game with handful of units and a central citadel structure from which you can hire heroes, but instead of having to build and upgrade buildings in a certain order to gain access to specific units and specific strategies, in many cases, you can build whichever unit-producing building you want, provided you have enough of the game's single, unified resource to afford it.

And you can build as many units as you want within your maximum population (or "population cap"). Like with other strategy games, this one limits your population based on your holdings, though the game also seems to have some very creative ways to push this limit. That is, although your maximum population cap in multiplayer is invariable, you can reach it more quickly by building farms or slaughterhouses that provide larger amounts of food to allow for larger forces. These structures can be built either at your starting base, or at expansion points on the map that can allow for either a single farm/slaughterhouse or a larger outpost that can sustain three additional nearby structures (though these structures are generally much harder to defend). So, if you're patient enough, you can sit and wait for your structures to generate enough resources so that you can afford to build a troll pit to commission the bulky behemoths right off the bat. Unfortunately, given the fast pace of the game, your opponents won't always let you wait that long. Meanwhile, all units and all buildings automatically gain "veterancy" by increasing in rank and power the more they're used. A single structure that creates many units will eventually upgrade itself to produce better versions of that unit, while units that defeat many enemies will also gain veterancy and become more effective in battle. Unit veterancy can come from defeating your opponent's forces, as well as from defeating neutral creatures holed up in lairs on the game's different maps.

Can the stout walls of Gondor withstand this?

The proud human soldiers of Gondor are perhaps the most straightforward of the four factions to play. Gondor seems to possess the archetypal military units you'd expect from a medieval-themed game, including swordsmen, archers, cavalry, and siege engines. However, these warriors begin the game with a considerable advantage: their starting fortress is enclosed in a thick, stone wall (similar to that of Helm's Deep in the motion picture The Two Towers). This wall begins with only one entrance, which is a huge wooden gate that can be manually opened and closed. Additional doors may be built, but they can only be used by the Gondor player, not by enemies. The walls of Gondor can even be fortified by mounted trebuchets, which hurl massive stones at enemies that shatter with a massive impact. But these stationary weapons are ripe targets for the game's many countermeasures. Gondor's basic infantry swordsmen can be upgraded to the heavily armored tower guards, which can be formidable on the battlefield with the right upgrades and when accompanied by the right hero, including the brothers Boromir and Faramir, along with Gandalf and the hobbit Peregine "Pippin" Took. Gondor seems to possess a well-balanced set of special powers, including an instantaneous healing spell and the summoning of reinforcements in the form of Rohan emissaries or elven archers.