The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-Earth for Windows

In the last couple of years, two real time strategy games based on The Lord of the Rings have come out. The first was a game from Sierra called The War of the Ring, followed by EA's entry The Battle For Middle Earth. Each has it's strenghts and weaknesses and is a good game in it's own right. I've bought both, but in case you don't want to shell out the cash for both and only want to get one, here are some tips to help you decide.

There are several similarites between the two: both have a single player and a multiplayer mode, both have skirmish and campaign levels, both have world editors (though War of the Ring's is much easier to use), both let you play as either good or evil and you can have A.I. teams on your side to help you fight the A.I. enemy in Skirmish levels (of which both games have several types.

Here's how they differ. The War of the Ring is similar in looks and gameplay to WarCraft III which is not a bad thing considering what a good game that is. If you like WarCraft and have ever though, "Gee it'd be cool to play this game with characters from Lord of the Rings" then this is the game for you. It's somewhat more simplistic that The Battle for Middle Earth in terms of its technology trees and overall depth, yet it's still a challenging game. The graphics have that slightly cartoony whimsical charm that the WarCraft games have. This game is based more on the books than the movies, so it doesn't have any music or voices from the movies but the voice acting and music is still good. In this game, you have two types of resources to gather that look a little different depending on which side you play but work the same way. One is a mineral resource that lets you build things and the other is a food resource that lets you create units. You can create different units depending on which buildings you build and how much you can upgrade them.

The Battle for Middle Earth is a little more serious looking and has more detail than The War of the Ring. In this game, you build farms either in your fortress walls or take over an independant settlement to build a farm in order to create units and earn money. You also build forts to earn money which you use to build other buildings. In this game, you have the added complexity of command points which you earn by defeating bad guys. The more command points you earn, the larger the army you can build. In this game, you can not be just good or evil but can choose between being Rohan, Gondor, Mordor or Isengard. Each group can create different units and buildings and their wizards have different spells. I like playing Rohan the best since they get the big calvary units that can mow infantry units down which is cool. They also have good archery units. Gondor's biggest strenght is that they build stronger buildings and can make more infantry. The infantry and calvary units come in and are controlled as companies instead of individual units kind of like the Total War series. You can even set different formations for them depending on upgrades you have. If you are defending something you want to use the defensive stance that has them circle around in a kind of box formation. If you are attacking, you want to use one of the wedge or line formations. Wedge formations are good for attacking if you are calvary especially. All sides can recruit heroes depending on how many command points you have. Heroes boost the abilities of the units around them and have special abilities of their own. Each hero is voiced by the actor who played him in the movie and have several sayings from the movies. This combined with cut scenes and music from the movies give it a very cinematic flair. The graphics are more photo realistic, especially if you have a powerful computer and turn the settings on high. That's one consideration to keep in mind: if you don't have a very powerful computer, you'd be happier with War of the Ring from a graphics standpoint as its system requirements are lower. It only requires an 800 mHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a 32MB DirectX 9 compatilbe video card whereas The Battle for Middle Earth needs a 1 Ghz processor, 256 MB RAM and a 32 MB video card to play. My computer has a 1 Ghz Pentium 4, 1 GB of DDRRAM and a 128 MB Radeon GEX Cube video card and I have to turn the detail and lighting settings down to get a fast, smooth frame rate with The Battle for Middle Earth whereas I can play War of the Ring with everything turned up full.

Both games are a lot of fun to play and I recommend both if your computer can handle the requirements. If youre a WarCraft fan and/or have a lesser PC, get War of the Ring. If you want a little more strategic depth and have a powerful PC get The Battle for Middle Earth.