Great RTS that is surprisingly overlooked
This game follows the entire story of The Lord of the Rings, not just one part. It does take liberties with the story, for example, Boromir can live through the entire campaign and even fight in Mordor depending on how you play the game. That is not necessarily a bad thing, its a lot of fun to have all your main characters fight in the ultimate battle. It is a huge game in terms of longevity and scales of battle with beautiful graphics and two long campaigns - good and evil. I felt it captured the epic sense of scale as the movies did.
You change history as either the forces of good or the forces of evil. The gameplay is a combination of turn-based campaign and real-time strategy missions. It allows you to pick your fights in the order you chose, to a certain extent. The player can control forces of good or evil and march across the Middle-Earth conquering maps along the way.
Each province has different bonus resources; one map might give you power points which can be used to power up the abilities and another might give you command points. The 3D map of Middle-Earth is very well rendered, it looks beautiful with Nazgûl flying over Mordor and such.
One feature that almost compels you to conserve your troops is that they are persistent throughout the campaign, i.e the troops you have at the end of one mission will be carried over to the next one. At times, you get to call in your allies; its a great feeling to see a huge bunch of troops coming to your rescue in missions like Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith. Preserving your troops also means that your heroes can level up, which is very crucial for victory.
I got the feeling that the some hero units are a little redundant – for example, I never used the hobbits in battle, unless I had to. I would always send them to one corner of the map and have Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Faramir, Boromir do the fighting for me. Having said that, I am glad that there are as many hero units as there are.
Graphics and sound are top notch, although I missed the support for widescreen monitors. Its not a huge hindrance, but I would have liked to have it given that I have a 24 inch screen running at 1920x1200. Instead I have to run the game at 1600x1200, so the image appears a little stretched. Voice acting and sound effects are great. I believe that Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee reprised their roles. The soundtrack of the movie makes the experience so much better.
I think this is a fantastic game, and it somehow seems overlooked. RTS fans should definitely play this. The good campaign itself lasts over 25 hours and that's only half the game. I definitely recommend this great game.
This review refers to only the good campaign; I never played the evil campaign.
+ Long campaign
+ Lots of hero units
+ Soundtrack
+ Voice acting
+ Combination of RTS and Turn Based gameplay
+ Huge battles (Helm's Deep!)
+ Graphics
- Lack of widescreen support
Verdict: Must play