Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth Review

Lord of the Rings, despite it's absolutely perfect video gaming premise, really hasn't made anything spectacular in the video game market. Without delaying the point, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth does nothing to change this. It is simply another mediocre game from EA, a game with a great license and potential to be truly special, but held back by the icy grip of death that is known as Electronic Arts.

Starting off with the bad, harvesting or gaining funds in BfME is a very flawed system. You gain funds by building farms, for the Good forces (Gondor/Rohan), or Slaughter Houses, for the Evil forces (Mordor/Isengard). Farms are entirely automated and never run dry. Each farm provides a trickle of resources every 10 seconds or so. This means that you must build a tremendous amount of farms, just to sustain a fighting force. As plots are taken by other buildings, you will find little resources to expand into another base and gain more plots, let alone build your army. So ironically, instead of having the focus on the battles, the focus is on finding plots to build farms.

As you kill enemy units, you gain experience, which leads to you being promoted. Promotions let you choose a power in a small tree of powers. Some powers are passive while others are often user initiated. Some powers include ELVEN ALLIES (brings in three squads of elven archers) and ARMY OF THE DEAD (brings in the deadly army of the dead). These powers, are too overpowering. An ARMY OF THE DEAD can easily wipe out your entire army. This renders building an army useless. There is absolutely no way to defend against the ARMY OF THE DEAD. Creatively added by EA, this feature was not well executed.