Like Rome: Total War, The Battle for Middle-Earth’s campaign is based on huge map, of which the player has to take provinces to win. However, The Battle for Middle-Earth campaign was a source of disappointment as soon as I began playing the game.
When I watched the trailers and the developer interviews I was under the illusion that it’d be a campaign map mirroring Rome: Total War. A map where you would have the factions of good (or evil) in a turn-based head to head with the opposing races, and that if your armies met then you’d fight right there in real time. I have to dismiss this hope now as sadly this is not the case with The Battle for Middle-Earth.
What you do get is a game where you tell your armies which level to fight next. You then zoom in and fight Command and Conquer style in real time, building up bases (called ‘camps’ in this), building defences and mustering a huge army to take out the other enemy bases before returning again to the campaign map to choose your next fight. The enemy has no turn itself on the campaign map, so it doesn’t retake provinces you’ve conquered or make any challenge to you. The map is simply making a fairly linear game appear more open ended.
Putting this crushing disappointment aside, it does play rather well for what it actually is. Battle for Middle Earth approaches the typical C&C style and modifies it somewhat. In the real time game structures can only be built on certain pre-defined spaces and defences can only be placed on certain spaces, thus drastically reducing the creativity of conventional free-form base design. Sounds like a really bad move when described here, but it does actually work!
You see, rather than spend ages pampering and trying to build up an awesome base, then repeating the process all over again on the next map, you are forced to build bases very quickly and concentrate on the real meat of the game; fighting and eliminating the enemy! This quickens the pace of the game, which reduces the time collecting resources, then building a self sufficient base, and then amassing a victorious army to take the field. In this game all you really have to concentrate on is combat. I wouldn’t be surprised if future real-time strategies went down this path.
Additionally, any units that survive the previous level are used for the next one. This gives an added incentive to preserve your units, rather than waste them C&C style in fruitless games of mindless attrition. Again, it really quickens the pace of the overall game by not having to build new units from scratch each level. However, this also means that because base building is kept to a minimum, and building new units is kept to a minimum, you can mop up some of the later levels by simply moving your previous force straight to the enemy camp before they have any chance to prepare! It also means later levels can become very repetitive, using the same units as the last match to wipe the floor with the enemy.
Units
The units you control in the game are drastically different depending on which race you play. Each side has two different cultures; the good have the Rohan and Gondor kingdoms, whilst the evil forces have Mordor and Isengard. The Rohan focus on having strong cavalry (which in the game are impressive as they mow down enemy units when they charge) whereas the Gondorians focus on defensive units. Mordor on the other hand focuses on large numbers of low cost troops and large trolls, whereas Isenguard have tough Uruk Hai with fancy siege weaponry to counteract the good forces defensive capabilities.
In true Lord of the Rings spirit the forces of good are far better warriors than the forces of evil. This can be extremely difficult for seasoned strategy players to adjust too, as few games have sides that are so severely weakened. After a while though you adapt and realise how to exploit some of the evil forces better attributes.
