The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth (PC DVD)

WHAT'S GOOD:
Not only is the best LotR game I've ever played, but it's also the best strategy game I've ever played. Your army fights in units, doing away with the tiresome process of purchasing your forces one man at a time, but you are also given Heroes to control, who add an entire new depth to the game with their powerful special attacks and the bonuses they grant to nearby troops. All of the main characters of the films (Gandalf, Merry, Pippin, Sam, Frodo, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir, Treebeard, Eomer, Eowyn, Theoden, Saruman, Shelob, Lurtz, Gollum and the Witch-King) have been included and each is entirely unique. Also, each of the carefully researched locations (most taken from Tolkien's texts rather than the films) presents different challenges, be it preparing to ambush a convoy of Haradrim or (best of all) desperately trying to prepare Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith for the immanent arrival of the enemy army. Oh, and just wait until you take control of your super special power (the Balrog for evil, the Army of the Dead for good)! Add to all this excellent graphics that even hold up when you zoom right in and a wonderfully streamlined resource-gathering system (none of the AoE '4 wood, 6 gold, 9 stone' rubbish). I would say this is 'one game to rule them all', but I'd have to break my own legs for using such a tired cliche. *SNAP - SNAP - ARRGGGH!*

WHAT'S BAD:
There's really not much to complain about here, but I was a little disappointed about the briefness of the levels in which you just control the Fellowship. I can't help feeling that they could have made an entire game just based on those too few bits. The other really bad thing about this game is the fact that you become so engrossed that you suffer from alien-abduction-style missing time and suddenly realise it's 3AM and you've been playing for six hours straight!

For those interested the game Specs as listed on the game itself are:-

System : Windows 2000 or XP only

Processor : 1.3GHz

Memory : 256Mb

Hard Drive : 3.5Gb
Only comes on a DVD-Rom and needs a minimum read speed of 8x

Video Card : 32Mb Direct3D (Cards supported: NVidia Geforce 2 GTS or later, NVidia Geforce FX Series or later, NVidia Geforce 6800, ATI Radeon 7500 or greater, ATI Radeon X800).

Sound : DirectX9.0b compatible

Internet: 56.6Kbps for 2 players or Broadband for 2-8 players.

It is testimony to just how good BFME is that I am still playing it eagerly today, over a year after purchase, coming home for a battle or two over the internet. Part of the great nature of the game is the clear progress you make - you can master easy, then you master medium, then you master hard, then you can go onto the much harder world of online noobs (in other words, players similar to yourself who have been playing a while and can beat the AI with no problems at all), then online medium, before finally the vicious and cruel online pros. Of course I'm not quite at that level yet...

The graphics are very good considering the scale, although they obviously wouldn't hold up in a FPS game. The characters are well balanced (for the most part) and the units are not too overpowering.

However, although I could waffle on for ages about the positives, they have already been covered. I do have some qualms over the balance issues.

The powers mean that no army is safe for long. The Balrog is ridiculously overpowered (and the new patch has just wiped out the only way of killing it so to speak) and can destroy a castle in a single hit. The Army of the Dead can destroy a whole upgraded army with little problem. Rohan is obviously better than the other allegiances - although it only has 7 castle slots, when the starting point is a camp it gets the same as everybody else. Rohan's resource buildings make troops so there's no need to build a unit production building, they have the best cavalry, the only cavalry archers, the best archers (elves) that also double up as deadly swordsmen and further still as pikemen, they have a stupidly large array of high powered heroes AND they can get melee resistant siege weapons on a settlement (Ents). It's too much and a Rohan player will often win an online game with ease.

In contrast, Mordor cannot get upgrades, cannot rank up their heroes and have poor quality troops. You know in a game between Mordor and Rohan (with similar quality players) if the Mordor player doesn't lay siege within 10 minutes the game is going to the Rohan player.