That is, if you consider a bad framerate seamless. And, since the game doesn’t seem to suffer from any lag, it all happens seamlessly. Nothing beats talking to your opponents as you build your armies, either to talk trash, compliment them on a good raid or just to catch up and shoot the breeze, if playing with friends. In these modes, players decide their faction, the map, the initial resources/money, even whether they want to play with one or three other people (yes, the game supports four players online).
And, in the campaign’s climactic last levels, when you control an army of both Elves and Dwarves, that level of uneasiness is exacerbated by your inability to group distinct platoons, making the entire experience a frantic, map-scanning mess.Īs a result (and since there’s no way to replay a level without starting the campagin over or not saving your progress), the online multiplayer games and user-created skirmishes are really where BFME2 shines.
In addition, the Good campaign’s alternating between Elves and Dwarves happens far too quickly, leaving you never quite at ease with the powers of each unit. It’s easy to think the good and evil plots seem weak simply because we’re a few years removed from the films (the game takes place during the same time period), but they actually are that boring. The campaigns, too, seem a bit clunky, with dismissible plots and forced variety as you wade through repetitive levels that vary only insofar as you’re controlling a new species of unit. By the end of the eight-hour good campaign (or evil campaign, if you start that one first) you get used to this control scheme, but you never get to the point where you actually enjoy it. It is possible to select all of a single unit type, or all the units on screen, or all the units in your army (even boats), but if you’d like to assign different duties to various groups of multiple units, you’ll have to manually select them and issue orders one at a time. For instance, after you assemble the ideal, multifaceted platoon comprised of several different unit types, there’s no way to highlight that group and assign it to a hotkey (say, the number 1), because there’s simply no keyboard. Once those units are created and given an order, however, it’s impossible to group them as you would on a PC, making division of duties decidedly clunky.
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This keeps the interface free from clutter while making every option available with a simple button press. For example, creating units and issuing commands is amazingly well done, with a simple system of trigger pulls and face buttons to “reveal” the commands at your disposal. Ironically, the game’s ambition and achievements also illustrate its shortcomings. BFME2, however, translates nearly every aspect of the RTS genre to Xbox 360, from troop control to bookmarking map locations to creating multiple structures and issuing unit-creation commands.
The controls weren’t quite right, the plot was sketchy, and the unit differences were just so-so. Predator: Extinction, but that game delivered more of a “nice try, better luck next time” vibe. And for the most part, it does a decent job.Įlectronic Arts has ventured into the console RTS genre once before, with Aliens vs.
But what Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth 2 does, for the first time, is successfully deliver the real-time strategy genre to a console. Even Rainbow Six and the new Splinter Cell online modes, to a lesser extent. That lesson: strategy games have been done before on consoles. You may be in the middle of summer break, or you may be like us DailyGamers and see college as a far-off memory, but it’s time for a lesson either way.
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