'The Battle For Middle-earth': A Retrospective
Image Source: YouTube
While not as prolific as Star Wars or superheroes, The Lord of the Rings still has its extensive library of video games. As someone who loves The Lord of the Rings, I played several of them growing up, and still find myself returning to them decades later. One of those games is Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth. Released in 2004, BFME is clearly a reskinned clone of Age of Empires. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s a lazy game. Let’s get into it.
BFME takes place during the original trilogy. On the good campaign you start in the mines of Moria with the Fellowship and fight your way through. After a fight in Lothlorien, there you take control of Eomer and a small contingent of Rohirrim and fight your way through Rohan. You can generally choose which territories to liberate, but every now and again you have a mission that you have to undertake, such as the attack on Helm Deep, or the ents invading Isengard.
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Most missions are the same, outside of the main story missions. You build up your bases, gather resources, make troops, and wipe out the enemy forces. Do that and you win. It can feel a bit copy/paste at times, especially once you’re late enough in the game and have several level 10 battalions that are fully upgraded that can just blow through enemy soldiers and encampments, as well as a group of level 10 heroes. It’s fun strategizing which buildings you’ll create and what upgrades you’ll prioritize for your soldiers. Later in the game you can get castles, and for the hero campaign, they’re surrounded by walls. There are few things more satisfying than making a castle, building some turrets and having the bad guys walk into the meat grinder while you’re building farms and armories safe inside your walls.
You have two choices: a good or an evil campaign. For the evil campaign, you start with Saruman building his army of Uruk-Hai in Isengard. Unlike the good campaign, where you play through the events of the trilogy, the evil campaign, fittingly enough, is what would happen if the bad guys won every battle. Amon Hen, Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith, everything goes Sauron’s way. The troops are all weaker than the good guys, so even on easy mode it’s hard to get battalions to level 10, but you can make a lot more of them, so it balances out.
While the game is certainly fun and I’ve played it over and over again, I’d be lying if I said it was perfect. Other than the main story levels, such as Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep, the levels are more or less the same thing over and over again. I think there are six different maps with slight variations. Given that there are almost 30 non-story missions, it can kind of feel repetitive.
One minor issue that I have is that there’s nothing that can affect the last level on good: the Black Gate. One of the missions you can do is Nurn, an area of Mordor. The description you get at the beginning of the level is that you’re crippling the heart of the Mordor war machine. However, whether or not you take Nurn, you still fight the same number of enemies with the same strength during the Black Gate mission. It would be a nice touch to have the last level be a bit easier if you take Nurn, but that’s a minor point, and that might not have been possible with the hardware they were working with. Totally minor point, though.
Image Source: GameSpot
For people who have played the vanilla game repeatedly and are looking for something new, there are several fan patches that are worth checking out. Some of them provide fixes and adjustments to the game, while others, such as 2.22 and Shadow and Flame, provide things such as new heroes, powers, and difficulty levels. I played through 2.22, and even on easy mode, it’s much harder, but there are several new heroes and units such as Sharku, Wormtongue, and Haldir, which is far from an exhaustive list. If you enjoy playing the game, but want something fresh, the patches are definitely worth a look.
Overall, the game, while pretty basic, is still an absolute blast and a must-play for any fans of The Lord of the Rings. It’s a very easy game to get into and pick up, and while the levels can be a bit repetitive, they’re hardly boring. If you haven’t played it, check it out. If you have and it’s been a little while, it’s definitely worth taking a look at again, especially with patches. It holds up.
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