#LOTR BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH 2 REVIEW PC#
While the game has a lot going for it on the 360, there are enough downsides and annoyances to keep it from competing with the PC version.
Hero on Xbox Live actually makes the game somewhat arcadey, and can be a nice change of pace from the longer game modes. You gain achievements by playing through the game and winning a certain amount of matches online, and that's also how you unlock new hero characters to play online. I barely like giving that up to Microsoft to pay for Xbox Live, so I hate that I need to give it to EA to play their game online.īack to game play. If you read the terms of service you'll also notice that EA now has access to all your personal data, including your credit card information. I've complained about this before and yes, the second you play the game you'll get some nice EA spam in your e-mail account. On something smaller it must be completely illegible.Īlso, you'll notice that you log onto EA's servers, not Microsoft's. I also ran into issues reading the text, even on my 56" HDTV, it's too damn small. If that's the best they can do with the hardware and the time limit they had to work with, they should have cut the shadows all together. They're huge, blocky messes that are actively distracting. While graphically overall the game is very pretty, for whatever reason the shadows in the game look atrocious. It's not quite as elegant as I would have liked, but with a few hours of practice it becomes second nature. Be prepared for something of a learning curve in that regard. You do have to memorize multiple combinations many of the controls require using the shoulder buttons as well as the face buttons. It's easy to move the cursor around and to move the view, and with a little practice the button presses became second nature.
The tutorials should be mandatory even after reading through the manual, and I soon found myself controlling the game with ease. I went back and played through the tutorials. I thought I would have remembered enough of my lengthy demo from E3 to at least fool around with the game, but I felt like I was always fighting the controls.
#LOTR BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH 2 REVIEW HOW TO#
My first few games were terrible, as I had no clue how to do anything. I dove straight into the game without a second thought. The menus are all done well, and keep that highly polished and majestic Lord of the Rings feel. This is more of a look at how much of the game survived being ported over to the 360. If you want to know if the game is good, that review is where you should head. I'm not going to review the story or break down the races from this game, I already did that once with the PC version, and I don't feel like repeating most of the points. It is going to take a lot of tweaking and ingenuity to get a passable RTS interface to work on a console controller, and even with two analogue sticks there's no guarantee it'll ever really be an efficient way to control a game like this. So when I first played Battle for Middle-Earth 2, it was like seeing a dancing dog: I didn't expect to see it done well, I just wanted to see it done at all. PC argument, but I think it's clear that the mouse and keyboard are always going to be the preferred method of controlling RTS games. It's been attempted before: see Starcraft for the N64 and Goblin Commander for multiple systems, but it was never done well. Instead, everyone was aghast at the idea of an RTS game being released for the consoles. When Battle for Middle-Earth 2 was announced for the 360, no one was wondering if Microsoft's new system could handle the game.
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