The Lord of the Rings has been used in video games before, but never to as great an effect before the movies began releasing.

The popularity of those films drove production of games based on both the movies and the books, which were sold as separate licenses.

At this point, there have been several games about the different movies from Electronic Arts, but all of them let players take the role of one of the Fellowship heroes in the game without allowing players to see the bigger picture of the struggle for Middle-earth.

Vivendi released War of the Ring a little over a year ago but managed to create a title that while decent, wasn't particularly inspiring, nor did it really capture the feel of the series.


 LOTRMeanwhile, Electronic Arts had their own Middle-earth strategy game in the works, one that took much from the movies, and a development team going at great length to make sure it represented the movie in terms of visual style and scale.

In that sense, EALA has succeeded for the most part. The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth is stylistically consistent with Peter Jackson's movies and is presented with style and polish.

While that portion of the game is excellent, the rest of it is simply decent. While it's fast and can certainly be fun, there's just something missing in the gameplay to categorize it as wondrous.

Be that as it may, I still have had an enjoyable time playing Battle for Middle-earth and I think fans of the movies will as well, even if the story isn't totally consistent.

The experience is broken up into two single player campaigns (good and evil), skirmish, and multiplayer.

Play the good campaign and you can force Mordor back within their borders and give Frodo enough time to destroy the Ring of Power.

Play as evil and do your best to grind the good right out of Tolkein's fantasy world.

There's definitely something satisfying about thrashing the hobbits and heroes of the Fellowship.
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