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AramisKale's Battle for Middle Earth 2 (PC)
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| [February 9, 2007 07:26:48 PM]
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Playing more BFME2 has made me appreciate the relatively simple display system; there's almost no screen clutter. The only thing permanently on your screen is the minimap and a row of buttons showing what your current units can do. There's also a nice radial display on each building that allows you to select what you want that building to do, but again, sadly, your buildings are locked into only one thing at a time. I wish more games followed Homeworld's example and allowed multitasking.
This game has very pretty graphics, and the neat ability to (occasionally) create secure locations within your walls, allowing gates to be constructed. It really is very cool to open your gate and let your cavalry charge out with the gate closing behind them. However, the aforementioned wall problem gets frustrating.
Also, the computer likes to build siege weapons. This is annoying cause they mess up your walls and only by mounting catapaults on your walls can you do something about them without running out to smash them. However, as I've mentioned, the friendly AI is stupid, so it doesn't attack the siege weapons unless you explicitly tell it to. At that point your walls are either on fire or rubble.
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| [February 9, 2007 06:41:33 PM]
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I'm a fan of the RTS genre, even if not everyone else is, but I think that it above all other genres (except perhaps MMOs) is the one where you have to have an amazing game to merit buying it, like Dawn of War, or Warcraft, or Starcraft.
Battle for Middle Earth 2 is not that game. My first dissappointment is that they did not get the actors from the film to do the voices. Then I played the game and I found it to be neat how the combat was very epic in the sense that you could wipe out entire battalions like nothing, I was also disappointed to discover that the friendly AI was programmed with the intelligence of a fish. You can set your units into stances, just like in most games. However, in this one, it doesn't affect anything. For example, I had several units of melee and several units of archers. I told the melee to attack only when enemies got close, and the archers to attack as soon as they saw anything. Regrettably, when I finished with the base modifications I was working on, I looked back at that troop to find that the archers were not firing at all, and the melee guys were mostly dead cause they'd moved from their earlier position. At other times I'll find melee units quite literally in the enemy base even though they weren't halfway across the map earlier. They just wandered in pursuing enemies or something.
The level design is good, although I would really like to see some maps that afforded better natural protection. This game has the nice ability to build walls (unless you're Mordor. NEVER play as Mordor) however, you can't build walls more than a certain distance away from your fortress (for some reason no one bothers to explain. But that's OK, they never bother to tell you that rule anyway) so unless you're in a tight area, you have to make these goofy diamond patterns or something to form a wall around your base, which doesn't encompass much. And since your resource buildings all have to be built a certain distance away from each other, and from other obstacles (another stupid rule) you can't protect them with your walls anyway.
This is one of those games that I keep playing, though I don't know why. It's addictive, even though it's not that good. It could be because of the few really neat elements.
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AramisKale's Battle for Middle Earth 2 (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 9 February, 2007
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