Read on, dear reader....

•• Story ••
The story seems to be a rehash of the Lord of the Rings, in that a new threat has risen in the form of Sauron, and evil being who wants to take over Middle Earth. The elves and the dwarfs must unite together or die. Can they overcome their differences and ally as a single force against evil? Really it doesn't matter and the story is completely inconsequential. Especially considering you get to play both sides in the battle of good versus evil. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

•• Gameplay ••
The nuts and bolts of any RTS game is the controls. The reason for this is because every RTS game is based on speed. How fast can you build up resources, erect buildings, create troops, manage defenses and then go and attack your opponent? Since this is not a turn-based game, most matches amount to "build build build - attack!". You see, an RTS game is all about strategy and building up your army of minions faster than the other guy and then unleashing your forces. You take a god's eye view of the map and control your forces from the sky. As a result, you need to have lightning fast reflexes, a mind for overall strategy and controls that allow you to do what you need to do to win. You shouldn't battle the controls as well as your opponent.

Along those lines, there is very little way that a controller with roughly ten buttons, triggers, thumbsticks, and bumpers can compete with a keyboard of 104 keys plus a mouse. However, EA does a very good job with what they have. And those things that lack are annoying, but they don't entirely kill the gameplay experience. Indeed the game is engaging, fun and surprisingly deep. Hard core fans of RTS games will find it a a fun diversion, but they won't abandon their PCs for it.

The single player campaign is basically one short campaign played twice. You can either be the good guys or the bad guys. And if you play one campaign, you'll find that playing the other is the same thing you just played only in reverse. So if you became attached to your victory against the forces of evil, you can then turn around and conquer the good guys with the forces you just beat. Makes for interesting gameplay, but there isn't a tremendous variation between the races.

You basically have resource gathering, building construction and armies. Each race has their own unique heroes who can be levelled up to be more powerful and experience points can be used to buy powers. But don't think this is an RPG, this is about as deep as it gets on that front. While the unique heroes and powers were interesting, I never found a time when I needed to use them in the campaign. In Multiplayer, the story was different, but in the campaign, I could basically beat the game by the sheer brute force of large armies.

I did run into a few gameplay issues. Several times, the enemy AI would get stuck on various things, forcing me to seek them out to progress to the next checkpoint or scripted event. This was rather annoying and a good QA pass should have weeded them out. As well, the performance is atrocious in many places. The average framerate dropped to under 20 frame per second on intense battles and even in times when not much was happening. This tells me the problem is not with the power of the console, but with bad game code.

Nevertheless, the game was fairly satisfying despite some annoyances like having to scroll around the map to find my base, or not allowing more than one builder to work on a building to make it build faster. But those are complaints only us long-time fans of the genre will care about. For everyone else, this is a solid, accessible RTS for the console.

•• Graphics ••
As mentioned above, the game suffers from real performance problems. This might lead you to think that the graphics are extremely complex, therefore taxing the system. While the graphics are pretty good, they are not going to blow your socks off. Thankfully, this is not a port of a lesser console, but instead correlates to the PC version of the same name. Since PC games are typically far better in the graphics arena than consoles, this version does have some fairly good things to look at. The buildings are pretty well developed and detailed and the ground has some excellent detail. Water looks very good, with waves and ripples. But the characters are very low poly and when zooming into battles, they are very limited in their animations.

Overall the graphical experience is pretty good, but combined with the low performance, it is a little disappointing for a next-gen console game.

•• Sound ••
The sound does not match up with the graphics in terms of quality - it surpasses it. Using the score from the films, the game captures the feel of the movies auditory grandeur. The music is sweeping and wonderful and makes the battles feel all the more exciting and dramatic.

The sound effects are solid, with lots of clanking and fighting sounds. The crowd cheers every time a battle is won, and amounts to a satisfying romp. The Voice-overs are few and far between, but sound great when they pop up. I don't know if it is the actual actors from the movies, but no matter. The vocals are professional, especially during the cutscenes when the story is being dictated.

•• Multiplayer ••
Fans of RTS games will find the multiplayer choices to be rather rewarding, but not as deep as on the PC. The idea is the same as in single player: Build, collect, construct, crush. All before your opponent does. I would have liked a little more configuration like on PC RTS games, but console players are a different lot and generally just want to jump in without worrying about map size, resource amount, or alliances. As such, the multiplayer is simple yet effective. And for those who want some variation, EA offers some preconfigured game types that vary from the standard fare such as King of the Hill, Resource Race, and Hero-focused battles.

In all, the multiplayer should give those people who enjoyed the single player campaign a reason to keep in their console a little bit longer

•• Achievements ••
The Achievements are fairly standard. You get some for completing the campaign on both sides of the good/bad spectrum as well as some for winning different types of multiplayer matches. Nothing special here and only a few to truly award those who excelled at the game.

•• Parents Should Know ••
This game is rated T for Teen contains a fair amount of violence. However, this violence is from a birds-eye view and there is no blood. This game is far tamer than the films were in terms of violence, so the rating is accurate. The real rating comes from the complexity of the game. This game is far too complex for the younger crowd.

•• Conclusion ••
A valiant effort at bringing the RTS genre to the console. Fans of RTS games might find it lacking in some details, but it's fun nonetheless.

Related reviews:
Xbox 360 Console - The Comprehensive Launch Review

Recommended:
Yes