Battle for Middle Earth II in a nutshell is a beautiful RTS with fun and addictive gameplay. However, if you pick up a copy any time soon, I will give you advance warning that you will end up playing a game that is seriously bugged and has looming game balance issues that may have you pulling your hair out.

The Good

I'm an optimist, so I like to give the good news first. The good news is that this game truly recreates the movies down to the smallest details. From the voice actors and the music to the look and feel of the units, Battle for Middle Earth II is the quintessential Lord of the Rings movie RTS experience. You'll be able to play as any of the following factions: Mordor (my personal favorite), Elves, Men, Dwarves, Goblins, Isengard. Each faction has unique units and abilities taken straight from the movies and books. You may build hero units which are also characters from the films and books. These heroes are tougher than the average unit and have exciting powers. You can even create your own custom heroes for use in multiplayer matches. Everything can be customized from the race and armor of the hero to the powers, strengths, and weakness much like an RPG.

As a workmate of mine says, the game takes a very rock, paper, scissors approach to unit versus unit combat. Cavalry will simply devastate infantry in a single charge, whereas pikemen will give Cavalry a quick and painful dirt bath. A seasoned player will take this into consideration in combat. The game has some formation support (though not as in depth as Kohan's was) and flanking maneuvers can actually give your unit a bonus to attack.

You don't build one man at a time; rather you build one battalion at a time. Each battalion can level up, becoming a more effective fighting unit, as can the heroes. As they level up they can gain new abilities, some passive which are always active, others requiring user input to fire off. Resource management is fairly simple and the game requires only a small amount of micromanagement as the emphasis is on the combat. The game is fairly quick and easy to learn, but takes many hours of getting your hat handed to you to master. If you're not into multiplayer, the game comes with two single player campaigns (good and evil), and, as an added bonus, there is a neat little strategic board game called the 'War of the Ring'.

The graphics are top-notch. Everything generates real-time shadows and there is specularity and real-time reflections on water which undulates and foams just as you would expect. Effects are well done and each is suited to the faction. Mordor's Eye of Saurown is sweet looking when you fire it off, accompanied with the sinister sounding voice of Saurown saying 'I see you.' Sound is true triple-A quality.

The Bad

The bad news is that this game is seriously unbalanced. Some units are nigh unstoppable when they have all their upgrades and some factions are underpowered while others are vastly overpowered. Mordor, for one, is the hardest faction to play in my opinion (why I always pick the underdog I will never know). Our only real choice is to build dozens of Orc battalions (which are extremely cheap) from the very start and rush the enemy bases so they can't build up their defenses and get their more powerful units built. This is called 'rushing' and many players consider it bad gameplay. Unfortunately, it's the only real option Mordor has if he wants to win. Elves on the other hand take a very long time to build units, but their archers are bar none the best unit in the game. They can do the most damage at the longest range and there are very few units (of equal production cost) among all the other factions that can meet them head on and win. I hear there are plans to nerf them in the next patch. Isengard berserkers can take out an entire fortress in a few hits (and not even a full battalion of them). It is an understatement to say the game has many serious balance issues. Most of the time, when I win I feel like I did so because I managed to exploit some of those flaws, and when I lose I tend to feel it's because someone else exploited them against me. That's a problem and it needs to be fixed.

The Ugly

Battle for Middle Earth II is about as buggy as a game can be without the release date being pushed back. How can they release a game like this? The game is full of random freezes, crashes, and the like. I played all weekend and spent most of my time trying to get into a game and failing due to random crashes and syncing errors. The game crashes to desktop on a regular basis and getting a multiplayer match to actually connect and play out is like playing craps. Sometimes you win, sometimes you loss and the game crashes with the now infamous on the forums 'game.dat' error. They claim that in 95% of all cases having a low end video card is the issue. I don't buy it. I have an ATI Radeon X800 with 256 megs of RAM and a powerhouse CPU to back it up. The game was obviously rushed out the door. Hopefully these issues will be solved with patches and soon. When will studios stop doing this to us! We're tired of getting games that are nearly unplayable due to rushed releases. Stop pushing your teams so hard because of your shortsightedness and poor planning!

Even with all the problems, Battle for Middle Earth II is a great game. Despite the constant crashing, despite the poor game balance, despite some factions being vastly superior to others, I found myself wanting to be at home playing today rather than working. That's a sure sign of a fun game in my book. And I'm sure they'll fix all the bugs and balance issues over the first few patches. It's not the best RTS I've ever played, but certainly one of the best looking, and definitely not the worst playing.