Top 1 Xbox 360 Site

July 5, 2006 –
After having developed solid action games on the current generation, Electronic Arts quietly solidified the game rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s books to complement its valuable movie rights, and ever since, the behemoth publisher has been busy. For PS2 RPG fans, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age took the license into quasi-Final Fantasy territory and for PC fans it’s built a growing real-time strategy series called Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth, accessing its rich RTS development teams garnered from the acquisition of Westwood Studios a few years back. While EA is cynically perceived as a semi-evil license factory churning out dozens of sports games a year and using popular licenses to crank our decent non-sports games, the company’s innovations usually go overlooked. For starters, we’ve got Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth II, which looks to pave the way for real-time strategies on consoles in this upcoming generation.

Battle for Middle-earth II takes the eponymous PC game and shows EA hard at work not only building a franchise, but mining the console market, the Xbox 360 market specifically, for potential gold. Unless you’ve been sharing a cave with Golem for the past few years, real-time strategies on consoles have unquestionably failed. Ninety-nine percent of the console RTS titles thrown onto consoles were badly ported PC games, titles that occasionally tried to generate a new way of handling console controls but didn’t work, and those that simply didn’t cut the mustard. This game handles console controls differently and it’s mainly why the game works so well. Working with Louis Castle from Westwood fame and a slew of expert RTS developers from its Los Angeles office, EA thought about and constructed a control scheme built to play intuitively and smartly from a console player’s perspective. The controls aren’t perfect and they’re by no means the equivalent to the quick, precision controls of the PC’s mouse and keyboard duo, but they do in fact work. I’ll even go so far as to say they work better than any other console RTS — period.

Build vast armies and then fight like a raging dwarf from hell!The control scheme is primarily based on the Xbox 360’s triggers, with minimal usage of face buttons and bumpers. By pulling and holding a trigger, a sleek HUD appears on the lower left-hand side of the screen in the form of a Palantir. Naturally, during the final battle versus Sauron and Sauramon using the Palatir was an unwise thing to do, but here it serves as a symbol, an icon, from which to do your business, untainted by Sauron’s flaming eye. With it open, you can command a bookmarking section and access builders, heroes, and the powers menu. The on-field command system is sleek looking and relatively efficient. You can command single units, the full army, and unit types such as all archers or all cavalry. Or you can split them into teams and bookmark them, and using a central cursor, move across the entire map with relative ease. You can control the whole army by double tapping the A button, or you can control just the units on screen by using the left trigger and double tapping on a nearby unit. The good thing about the controls is that they’re built for console players. They feel like they should. Nearly every action is one to three steps away, with face buttons and even bumper buttons coming into play with relative ease. EA’s sharp innovation and risk pays off, for the most part. These controls don’t feel forced or half-assed, and you’ll pick up the whole thing in a matter of five or 10 minutes.

Use the power menu to throw curve balls at the enemy, like the joyous fisticuffs of Tom Bombadil. Oh-diddily-oh-di-hey!The controls’ weaknesses come into play when you directly compare the game to the PC version or any PC RTS for that matter. Even without comparing them to the PC, the console controls drill down beyond the surface level of the 360 controls to a deeper level, but they taper off when it gets down to the finest layers of micromanagement. The PC’s controls are really brilliant; they’re still far superior to the Xbox 360’s controls. With the PC you can quickly group any type of unit, speedily execute moves, and handle an entire map with ease. Where you’ll find the Xbox 360 version breaking down is in micro-managing units at the finest level of control. The Xbox 360 game can do such tasks, and while the smartly designed preview system works on a number of levels, it just doesn’t re-create the level of precision control that the mouse and keyboard provides with the required speed of the PC. If you’ve never played an RTS before, then you might be wowed. If you’re familiar with PC RTS titles, you’re not likely to convert.

Still, having a passable knowledge of PC RTS games, I’m impressed with how much fun I’ve had playing Battle for Middle-earth II. After having put in numerous hours in all the modes — the good and evil campaigns and the multiplayer modes — my abilities with the 360 controller have improved over time. On the 360, the cursor, which is anchored at the center of the screen at all times, enables you to skip across the map and deliver a sense of command over vast areas. Flashpoints indicate areas of conflict and highlighted spots indicate objective points. The mini-map attached to the Palantir offers a cone of vision indicated by a V to orient your direction. Unfortunately, you can’t use the map to small place units like on the PC, which is a small bummer. The game offers easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels before each mission, and you can save anywhere in the level, with up to about 15 save spots — which is a standard touch on the PC and one we’re grateful to have on the 360. One little issue, however, is that you have to beat an entire campaign before being permitted to replay an individual level.

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