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ajrich's Battle For Middle Earth (PC)
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| [March 2, 2008 03:00:00 AM]
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GAMEPLAY
Started in on the evil campaign this time, and I can see why Rohirrim can run over orcs the way they can: you build a lot of orcs. The very first mission is to build 100 orcs. After the first, evil missions boil down to "build a lot of orcs and kill everything." Your bases in the evil campaign are generally less secure than in the good campaign - both of the good sides get free walls around anything bigger than an outpost, and castles are nigh impenetrable without siege equipment, which the AI doesn't really make good use of.
DESIGN
The most distinctive aspect of this game is the building system. Buildings can only be placed on "foundations" which are created by citadels, the foundations for which are pre-placed on the map. There are three levels of citadel foundation: outpost, camp, and castle. Outposts have three foundations regardless of faction, while camp and castle foundations depend on which army you play. Resources are generated by structures, and so generating a lot of resources precludes building a large number of unit producing buildings. This system also precludes "offensive towering" - building "defensive" towers in or near the enemy base, a strategy endemic to the genre. This system also allows the pace of the game to be defined by the map - a map without castle foundations is very different from a map with camps at most.
Buildings also have three "levels" - resource buildings level up automatically over time, while unit producing structures level up after building a certain number of units. Higher level resource structures produce more resources, while higher level unit producing buildings build faster and often gain access to new units and upgrades at level 2.
These are innovative systems, but they are innovative ways of simplifying the genre - rather than deciding when it is time to "tech up," or how to lay out their base, players upgrades their infrastructure in the course of building up their armies and have base layouts defined for them. This, combined with other aspects of the game's design which tend towards the same end, are probably a consequence of the game's movie license - these decisions were probably made to cater to those drawn to the game by the movie brand without necessarily being interested in an RTS game as such.
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| [February 27, 2008 01:13:45 AM]
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A note between my assignment entries - one of the strangest choices they made in this game was to change any part of the plot that would deny you a hero unit (no dropping Gandalf off the bridge in Moria, Boromir survives Amon Fen, ect. This might be understandable if to do otherwise would cause a hero shortage, but the Fellowship missions suffer from acute hero glut.
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| [February 26, 2008 01:27:18 AM]
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SUMMARY
Battle for Middle Earth is an RTS set during the movie version of JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. It features squad units (also seen in Dawn of War), hero units (also seen in Warcraft 3), and a unique build system, in which buildings can only be placed on predefined plots.
GAMEPLAY
I played the first few missions of the Good campaign. The campaign starts in Moria, which roughly tracks the Moria scenes in the movie and acts as a kind of tutorial focusing exclusively on hero units. It goes well enough until the very end, in which the Balrog fight is playable. An on-screen prompt advises the player to "use Gandalf's special abilities to defeat the Balrog," but simply using those abilities as often as possible is insufficient - one must also "dance" Gandalf while those abilities recharge, giving a series of move orders that keep him just out of the creature's range. This is unintuitive, and I died twice before I caught on.
For as far as I got, the campaign alternates between "fellowship" missions, which involve guiding the fellowship (which consists entirely of hero units) through predetermined hordes of normal enemies, and Rider missions, in which the player fights a skirmish as the Riders of Rohan. Only the last Riders mission I played offered any real challenge (the Balrog being a fake challenge by my lights). The Riders' cavalry seems a mite overpowered - they can simply run over any enemy infantry for instant kills at the cost of a little health.
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ajrich's Battle For Middle Earth (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Tuesday 26 February, 2008
GameLog closed on: Friday 14 March, 2008 |
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ajrich's opinion and rating for this game |
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