My god! I thought Battle for Middle Earth II was bad, but it was sheer brilliance compared to this! The first thing I noticed was how the witch king doesn't sound remotley like the one from the film & now the characters are more like something from a poor RTS clone of Warcraft.
In the end, I just couldn't stand to play it. I was in love with the first game, but EA just proved that they're sole motivation here was a quick cash grab.
Avoid like the plague!

This game is awsome. If you have a good enough computar for everything on the graphics are superb and the gamplay is awsome aswell i think it beats most other games of its kind

a great game & a great narrative worthy of novelisation itself. As much as i love this game i can't help but mention a couple of ways it cud have been improved: firstly, as with battle for middle earth 2 you cant pick where u invade in middle earth. Which waz one of the great features of the very first game as it gave u more freedom. Also i cant help but feel this was a perfect opportunity to take a story from middle earth to a much darker place, which would have worked perfectly with the theme of the game being the witchking's rise. However, despite this i just want to say it waz a great game to play but also great for the story that im sure tolkien fans will appreciate as the game makers have moved on from the original trilogy & started to explore the other tales of middle earth. Hopefully this is the first of many to come!

I've actually completed the Angmar campaign before BFME II. This is partly because it is quite short. However, the missions have some variety and the storyline does introduce interesting new characters and history. I would recommend playing it on Hard level as it was fairly straightforward to complete (although once I had to come up with a good idea to complete a mission)

The Build-A-Hero function is great fun but I have a few criticisms:

1. It would be really nice to use one's Custom Heroes in the Angmar Campaign.

2. More female heroes would be nice and a greater variety of outfits.

3. One should be able to use Good heroes with Evil forces and vice versa.

The War of the Ring is challenging. I would have liked much more in-game explanation of the rules and perhaps some basic advice on strategy as often one does not have the game instruction book to hand.

However, overall this is well worth buying and I am even buying my second copy to play over an internal network!

I wasn't planning on writing a review for this game because I've owned it for about 6 months, played it to exhaustion and loved every minute of it. However, my reason for now coming on here and writing this review is because of the following 2 things: (1) when I first played this game it was on a humble Pentium 4 running normally at 3.0GHz. It ran well. However, now I've upgraded to a Quad Core (4x 2.4GHz) running Vista. And there's a problem. Everything in the game runs at a higher speed - the men run around much more quickly, shots are fired much more quickly, etc,... basically it's more tricky to play now because things are happening too quickly. I'm not sure why this should be. I haven't experienced this problem with any other game. Which brings me onto my next point. (2) I had hoped that by downloading the latest patch the runaway speed problem would be fixed. But oh no... not only did it remain but somehow the game has become incredibly easy. I'm playing on hard level and barely losing any troops, even carelessly running into the AI's army and not micromanaging AT ALL and still barely losing any troops. That screws up the game for me. I'm a pretty good player, however, and could manage the game on hard level before the downgrading, but at least it was a decent challenge, each level taking an hour or more. Now it's ridiculously easy. I've studied the changes made in the patch and they seem to be reasonable balance fixes, nothing outrageous Well, either the balance is actually now way off or I've become overnight the world's greatest RTS player ;) I'll leave you to figure out which is probably more likely... Oh while I'm moaning I would say that for any of you who have nice big LCDs (mine is 22" widescreen) the maximum resolution in the game is not going to fit your screen nicely, leaving a sort of poor quality slightly stretched image which doesn't look sharp and focussed. The annoying thing is that this game is now 'old' so I doubt EA will bother to fix these problems which, as I say, look like they're caused by the ultra performance of new hardware which wasn't anticipated by the software developers at the time of writing the game.