Daft coding makes this ring not worth finding.
It's not the source material that hurts Middle-earth. In fact, it's one of the reasons you may play this abomination longer than you really should. The Lord of the Rings universe is perfect for this type of game. Large-scale battles like Minas Tirith and Pelennor sound perfect for a strategy game, and they are. Unfortunately, you won't be playing in any of the famous battles from the films, as Middle-earth II serves as sort of a "Here's what was happening elsewhere" scenario. Most of the characters and events in this game are either obscure references from the novels, or completely fictional altogether. For those scenarios, you need to pick up the original game, which, for some odd reason, wasn't included along with Middle-earth II's hefty next-gen asking price. But that's only the half of it - this game also shipped with missing levels that were complete at the time it shipped, but witheld due to EA's new business model of charging for downloadable content. The only way to get these levels without paying for them was to preorder the game at EB/Gamestop, but even that was a mess, as most stores never received the vouchers to download the levels. But make no mistake, it wasn't beauty that killed this beast, but the framerate. What really hurts the game is how poorly it's been handled on the visual and mechanical side. For starters, Middle-earth II has the ugliest shadows seen since the 16-bit era ended. Jaggy, shimmering, lego-sized pixels copulate on the ground amd form bastard offspring that are supposed to pass as shadows, which is completely unacceptable given the hardware this game is running on and the modest visuals. Even worse, the framerate is simply atrocious; there are times when it will dip down into the single digits, sometimes inexplicably. It's not like the character models and environs are overflowing with textures, either. RTS games usually aren't visual beasts to begin with, but Middle-earth II's visuals could best be described as "utilitarian." The character models look clean, and there are certainly a ton of them on-screen at times, but that doesn't excuse this broken game's framerate, as Kameo and Dead Rising have shown that it's possible to use the 360 hardware to draw hundreds of enemies (much more detailed enemies, I might add) on-screen without the massive framerate problems this game has. The framerate in this game gets so bad that there are literally times where button presses don't register. It's just completely unacceptable to call this a next-generation game when looking at it from a technical standpoint. It's also worth noting that the camera in Middle-earth II is way too constrained. You'll often find yourself frustrated that you can't pull it back farther to get a decent assessment of how the battle is going. The developers tried to correct this by adding a bite-sized map to the upper-right of the screen, which shows a red blip to indicate where a battle is raging, but there are times when you'll have three or four blips going off at once, and you'll lose troops simply because you can't get there fast enough to see what's happening.
As a game, Middle-earth is a pretty fun. Watching hundreds of orcs, goblins, trolls and the like battle with the forces of good is spectacular when the game runs smooth. There's also a "Hero" system built into the game, and while these characters have special moves, they're far too easily lost in the shuffle and usually die before being put to proper use. Even so, it's pretty col seeing Shelob charge into a battalion of troops and poisoning them with her stinger. There's a wide assortment of buidings, which aid in the manufacturing of better implements of war. Harvesting resources is also a fundamental part of the game, as it's impossible to build a suitable army without first having a good many resource farms in place to fund them.
The game's controls are definitely its best feature, and they're the only reason the score isn't several points lower. Everything has been simplified as much as possible, and hotkey commands have been implemented onto a scaling "Palantir" menu at the lower left-side of the screen. From here, you can order your troops to do just about anything, but you can also assign orders to individual units or battalions as well by highlighting them and assigning them their own hotkey from the palantir menu. Even though it's possible to assign orders individually, you'll probably find yourself building as big of a well-rounded army as possible and simply ordering them to attack in force. Battles in Middle-earth II usually come down to who was able to get the bigger army assembled first, but that's a flaw in most games of this type. Still, the controls for Middle-earth II have raised the bar as far what can be expected from an RTS game on a console, which is no small feat.
The audio in the game is pretty decent as well, featuring samples of Howard Shore's fantastic score from the films. There's also plenty of realistic clanking, clashing, hollering, bellowing, splintering and what have you. Hearing the shriek of a Nazgul or the pounding drum of a cave troll is sure to bring chills to fans of the movies. In short, this sounds just like the movies, which is nothing but good.
The online play is good, not great. Most of the inherent problems of the offline game are compounded in the online mode, but at least the mode types are varied and interesting. There's a hero vs. hero mode, which sounds better than it is, but there's also a sublime King of the Hill mode, which plays just like it sounds. The most disappointing aspect of the online mode is that it's simply too hard to find another person playing the game, which isn't all that surprising given the quality of the port.
But in the end, decent sound and the innovative control scheme aren't enough to save the day. It's just too bad that EA opted to ship this game as it did, because this really could've been something special. Instead of being the RTS equivalent of Halo, which proved that first-person games could be done, and done well on consoles, Middle-earth proves it, but does so in a game that isn't very fun to play due to technical problems. The spectre is also raised as far as value goes - if you have a PC capable of running this game, you'd be far better off buying both the original and this sequel for about ten dollars less than what they're asking for this miserable game.