Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth 2 is the second installment in the Real Time Strategy series from EA games and the first to come to a console. If you've seen the Lord of the Ring movies then you can pretty much guess what its going to be about. That’s right! It’s all about controlling an army on either the good side or the evil side.

The single player campaign or story mode is just that, good or evil. Altogether there is 16 missions, 8 for the good 8 for the Evil. For those who've never played a RTS game, the point is to build up your army and command them into combat. So when playing the good campaign your playing as Elves, Dwarves, and Man. Playing the evil campaign your playing as orcs, trolls, and goblins. Now what would a Lord of the Rings game be if it didn't involve characters from the original books and movies? Not much of one. However in BFME2 you do not have the main characters from the story, there is no Frodo and Sam rushing to melt down a ring. Instead some of the characters you will recognize are Morwen, Elrond, Gimli, Treebeard, Sauron, The Witch King, and others.

Playing the single player you have your basic rush to defend, clear the pass, and protect areas while repelling evil away from you as you go to attack and crush the orcs and goblins. Good campaign you play as Glorifindel and Gloin for the most part mixed in with King Dain among a few others as the story progresses. Evil campaign it’s all goblins and orcs and your typical people that rule them. Moving on from that though it’s the exact opposite of the good campaign, instead of saving these areas and clearing passes and protecting your going through destroying all the good things. The story is your typical Lord of the Rings story throughout. But for those that saw the movies, the games are filling in the gaps of what happened elsewhere.

Now the single player isn't all the game offers it also offers multi-player through online play. The multi-player only offers a 4 player support but that is more than enough considering how many armies and action is taking place on screen at one time. Surprisingly the multi-player has plenty of different options to make the game far from boring. Some of the types are Hero vs Hero which lets you have use of 4 heroes to wage war against another person using 4 heroes. Versus which is your typical versus mode and can allow you to team up with one or two people to make it one vs three or two vs two or even one vs one vs two. Then there’s the other modes like King of the Hill, Capture and Hold, and Resource Race. All of them have their unique points. Being a meat and potatoes man myself I’m done describing the game for you. Continued on page 2 »