Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth 2 - retro special to the strategy hit
Lord of the Rings
"Spear will shatter, shield shatter, a sword day, a blood day, before the sun rises!" After this address, Theoden rides into battle with his army, creating one of the goose bumps in film history! When orcs, elves, humans, dwarves and hobbits meet in "Lord of the Rings", grass no longer grows. Electronic Arts thought so too. The publisher had the license for the films and books under its roof in the mid-2000s and therefore several games were developed, including a real-time strategy game series.Battle for Middle-earth conjured up the epic battles for Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith on the screen, and A good year later came the second part, which was even more rounded: Battle for Middle-earth 2. Because he is celebrating his 15th birthday this year, we fetched the game from the archive again and plunged into battle alongside Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas!
Table of contents
1 Starting the fight with difficulties 2 Relaxing variety 3 When EA was still a single player 4 War of the Ring & Expansion 5 The series lives on 6 Even today a must for strategy fans! 12:12DHdR: Battle for Middle-earth 2: Retro-Special for the best LotR strategy game loadVideoPlayer ('84121', '& sAdSetCsategory = article_featured', 12, '16: 9 ', false, 1376500, false, 112700, 260 , false, 0, '', '', false); The Lord of the Rings: The Battle of Middle-earth 2
Having difficulties starting the fight
The main menu can still be left as it is today and just listen to the music. Source: pcgames.de But "plunging into battle" is no longer that easy, because the games can no longer be found easily. Since the license is currently no longer with EA, but with Warner Games, the games may no longer be sold. This means that a digital version does not exist on Steam, Origin or GoG.com. So if you still have the DVD of the games on your shelf, consider yourself lucky. Due to the tricky legal situation, the games get collector's value and, for example, are already causing the prices on Ebay to rise.The ravages of time are also gnawing at the program code and so the game, like so many other older titles, is running around under Windows 10 and does not start. Fortunately, the fans have remedied this with a patch. So then! The game starts, the logos are running and we come to what is probably the most beautiful main menu in game history, which brings tears of nostalgia to fans of the films.
We don't see epic battles or armies, but a scene from The Lord of the Rings - The Companions in which the Fellowship of the Ring descends the River Anduin and passes the Argonath. This scene, in which Frodo, Aragorn & Co. drive along the huge stone statues, exudes an incredible peace and quiet. Meanwhile, the homely soundtrack of the films accompanies the backdrop. These images are in stark contrast to the rest of the game, which is ultimately about epic and gigantic battles. The main menu is therefore the haven of calm from which one rushes into battle.
The heart of the fighting
Assault on Isengard! If you storm a fortress with the Ents in your luggage, grass will no longer grow. Source: www.mobygames.com Battle for Middle-earth 2 offers three major game modes. The classic battle mode is what everything is based on. This is where the pure real-time strategy takes place. There are six groups to choose from. Humans, elves and dwarves on the light side, and Mordor, Isengard and the cave orcs on the dark side. The factions differ, but there is usually a reflective counterpart on the opposite side. Where the cave orcs dig tunnels through which they can quickly get across the map, on the light side it is the dwarves who set up their mines.Cards that are played on are in abundance in the game. Once we have clicked together a match according to our wishes, it starts. We always start with a main building that has already been built and two master builders who pull up our settlement. In contrast to Battle for Middle-earth 1, you no longer have any fixed building sites within a standing fortress with castle walls. Now we build everything ourselves. To this day, this decision divides the fans. Where some find the finished fortress great, others prefer to build everything themselves.
The main part of Battle for Middle-earth 2 is classic real-time strategy. With resource buildings we farm our money, which we then use to build other buildings and train troops. In addition, there are defensive structures such as walls, defense towers and ballistae, but also passive bonuses such as stronger masonry. The troops are different, but quite similar between factions. In addition to swordsmen, ranged fighters and lancers, riders and heavy war machines such as catapults or ballistae are waiting. The strengths and weaknesses follow the classic rock-paper-scissors principle. Swordsmen are weak against archers, who in turn cannot withstand cavalry and the cavalry is quickly impaled by the lancers.
Loosening change
You build walls yourself in the Battle of Middle-earth 2. Source: Electronic Arts To spice things up even more, there are the heroes. Anyone who has scraped together a lot of resources can recruit Gandalf, Gimli or Saruman. The dubbing is very atmospheric, because in the German voice output the voice actors from the films sometimes speak their role. There are minor additional skills in the Palantir. If we have fought successful battles, we collect points that we invest in bonuses. That ranges from a simple buff of our troops to the summoning of the Balrog.Brand new in Battle for Middle-earth 2 is the mechanics around the one ring. Where you could still recruit good old Gollum as a hero in the predecessor, he now runs across the battlefield by chance. He has one ring in his luggage. Whoever rivets Gollum without further ado, collects the ring of power and recruits either Sauron personally or Galadriel Storm Queen for a ridiculous amount of resources. This is a nice gimmick and can turn a hopeless situation again.
The balancing is quite successful, but there is a problem at one point or another. With some factions you can see very clearly that they are weaker than the others. Anyone who goes into battle with the cave orcs or the dwarves, for example, doesn't have so much to laugh about. The levels of difficulty of the computer opponents are also not particularly balanced. While on "easy" and "medium" they just hang around absently and are not a challenge, the hard mode is demanding but feasible and the brutal level of difficulty of the opponents is almost too extreme.
Nevertheless, they do Combat fun and the details in the game are still beautiful to look at today. If you can watch the orcs torment their trolls or the Uruks pull their soldiers out of the pit, you can see the attention to detail every time.
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The story is told with a mixture of drawn images and in-game sequences. Source: pcgames.de The second heart of Battle for Middle-earth 2 is also very entertaining: the single-player campaign. Believe it or not, EA was still focussing on strong single player experiences in 2006. In the Battle of Middle-earth we not only play the winning side around the alliance of humans, elves and dwarves. As a second campaign, the forces of Mordor are waiting for us. So we can help the dark forces to shatter the light, bring the eternal darkness and at the end even run across the battlefield with Sauron personally.Battle for Middle-earth 2 does not tell the main story of the films, but in a concentrated manner on lesser-known battlefields in the north of Middle-earth, such as Dol Guldur or the Erebor. Connoisseurs of books and additional literature will get their money's worth here. The character of Tom Bombadil, who was deleted from the films, finds its way into the games. Nevertheless, well-known places are not neglected, for example when we let Lorien, Rivendell or the Shire burn. The campaign does not reinvent the wheel, but it offers a few hours of fun in which you get to know the peculiarities of all factions.
War of the Ring & Expansion
The third mode, the battle, is also exciting around Middle-earth 2 and tells its very own stories: The War of the Ring mode! It puts us on a map of Middle-earth, which is divided into different zones and countries. On this one you move your units, build houses, recruit armies and of course go to war. Anyone who thinks of the Total War series is spot on. The developers of Battle for Middle-earth have strongly oriented themselves towards this strategy game series. The battles can be carried out automatically or in real time if desired.The War of the Ring mode is based heavily on the Total War series Source: PC Games Although the War of the Ring is by no means as deep as a Total Wars, it does Especially for Lord of the Rings fans there are always strange stories when Aragorn is Lord of Mordor and wants to conquer the world from there.
Half a year after the release, Battle for Middle-earth 2 received an official one Expansion with the addon "The Rise of the Witch King". To this day, the extension in the Guinness Book of Records holds the title for the longest name of a computer game extension. In addition to the long name, players get a new story about the leader of the Nazgûl, a new faction for skirmishes and the War of the Ring and new heroes.
The series lives on
But from then on the big one came Be silent. The game was very well received, received top ratings and still manages a meta score of 84 - slightly higher than that of its predecessor. But none of that helps, because the series was sentenced to death. In 2006 the hype about the films slowly subsided and the real-time strategy was on the decline anyway. Three years later EA had to cede the license to the universe.The Edain-Mod is still being developed today and turns Battle for Middle-earth 2 inside out. Source: pcgames.de Since then, the Battle of Middle-earth may no longer be officially sold. But the series lives on unofficially. The fan community has rallied protectively around the games and keeps them alive with fan patches and mods. First and foremost there is the Edain Mod. The fan project builds on Battle for Middle-earth 2 and is still being developed today. In addition to balancing optimizations, the mod also throws the basic concept overboard and again provides fixed construction sites and fortresses. In addition, the factions have been revised and expanded. Edain, for example, splits the people in Rohan and Gondor as separate factions.
On top of that, another fan development team is working on a complete remake of the first part. With Battle for Middle-earth: Reforged you want to bring the magic of the games into the Unreal Engine 4. But here, as with so many huge mod projects, you have to wait and see what comes next.
