An Interesting Game Indeed.
Combat in the game is turn based (ie. each character gets a turn to do a move or whatever). While eventually your team will include six members only three can fight at a time, press L1 to switch teammates (During the course of the game occasionally a fourth player such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Eowyn, Legolas or Gimli will fight beside you, you cannot switch these players out).The game has many levels starting at Eregion and ending at the Pelennor Fields (why there is no black gate level I don't know). For each level there are a set of quests to do while you roam about the map finding treasures (such as items, weapons and armor) that prove quite helpful. There are both random battles and battles that are set into the level. By completing quests and winning battles you earn experience points and "level up" leveling up earns Stat points for you characters which you can use to enhance their attributes such as strength, dexterity etc, (remember in Middle Earth they didn't have steroids). After beating each level you unlock that level in "Evil Mode" you fight the level's key battles while playing as the bad guys, winning Evil mode levels unlocks new equipment for your good guys.
The game also has "skill trees" basically each character has a set of skills and using those skills will unlock other skills in that skill set: Berethor has leadership and swordcraft skills, Idrial has swordcraft and spirit skills, Hadhod has axecraft and spirit skills, Elegost has bow craft and ranger craft skills, Morwen has dual axe craft and thiefcraft skills and Eaoden has spear craft and spirit skills. You also unlock scenes throughout the game which are scenes from the movies, which are often narrated by Gandalf who uses them to reveal information to Berethor. I strongly recommend watching them as they are interesting and often reveal key details about the storyline of the main characters, especially Berethor.
The game starts out with Berethor riding a horse and Gandalf's voice talking to him. Berethor is attacked by two ringwraiths (or if you prefer to use the Quenya (high- Elven) term Ulairi or the black speech ( The language invented by Sauron) term Nazgul. You fight them and get wounded then Idrial appears, drives the Nazgul away and heals Berethor and the Quests begin.
Overall this was a pretty good game with good graphics and an original storyline. I beat this game three times: one on each difficulty mode (Easy, Medium, Hard). The characters and environments are cool. I'm not a major RPG fan (this is the only RPG game I currently own), but I like it, it was a little different from My other Lord of the Rings PS2 games ( Two Towers, and Return of the King) which were hack-and-slash button mashers where you played as actual characters from the book, but it was a welcome change.