Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth 2 is the second installment in the Real Time Strategy series from EA games and the first to come to a console. If you've seen the Lord of the Ring movies then you can pretty much guess what its going to be about. That’s right! It’s all about controlling an army on either the good side or the evil side.

The single player campaign or story mode is just that, good or evil. Altogether there is 16 missions, 8 for the good 8 for the Evil. For those who've never played a RTS game, the point is to build up your army and command them into combat. So when playing the good campaign your playing as Elves, Dwarves, and Man. Playing the evil campaign your playing as orcs, trolls, and goblins. Now what would a Lord of the Rings game be if it didn't involve characters from the original books and movies? Not much of one. However in BFME2 you do not have the main characters from the story, there is no Frodo and Sam rushing to melt down a ring. Instead some of the characters you will recognize are Morwen, Elrond, Gimli, Treebeard, Sauron, The Witch King, and others.

Playing the single player you have your basic rush to defend, clear the pass, and protect areas while repelling evil away from you as you go to attack and crush the orcs and goblins. Good campaign you play as Glorifindel and Gloin for the most part mixed in with King Dain among a few others as the story progresses. Evil campaign it’s all goblins and orcs and your typical people that rule them. Moving on from that though it’s the exact opposite of the good campaign, instead of saving these areas and clearing passes and protecting your going through destroying all the good things. The story is your typical Lord of the Rings story throughout. But for those that saw the movies, the games are filling in the gaps of what happened elsewhere.

Now the single player isn't all the game offers it also offers multi-player through online play. The multi-player only offers a 4 player support but that is more than enough considering how many armies and action is taking place on screen at one time. Surprisingly the multi-player has plenty of different options to make the game far from boring. Some of the types are Hero vs Hero which lets you have use of 4 heroes to wage war against another person using 4 heroes. Versus which is your typical versus mode and can allow you to team up with one or two people to make it one vs three or two vs two or even one vs one vs two. Then there’s the other modes like King of the Hill, Capture and Hold, and Resource Race. All of them have their unique points. Being a meat and potatoes man myself I’m done describing the game for you.

The basic premise of any RTS console game is that its going to be utter garbage that even the trash man tries to steer clear of, however BFME2 is actually a quite solid game. The control scheme while still nowhere near competition to the PC control is nicely suited for the 360. Graphically the game is quite stunning at times. For example, your army will look full and completely healthy when first built but after one battle you can tell the damage they have taken just by looking. Then there’s the overall online component to throw in with the good because while EA in the past has been known to have multiple lobby and online problems. There are not that many with BFME2.

The story, while your basic Lord of the Rings story, is quite fun and very well put together. Now some of the other good things the game offers is all based off of the control scheme for the 360. EA LA has made it very easy to use the controller to build control and upgrade your army and fortress all at the same time while still being able to see the battlefield and know when something is coming at you. The other thing that really stands out is the magical powers. Oh… how they will save your ass at times and if you don't use the correctly could be the turning point of any battle your into.

And of course what would a Lord of the Rings games be without the voice over cast which draws a lot from the movie cast. Yet the good points keep coming back to the fact that it’s an RTS game that actually fits and works well on a console. However along with the good you always have the bad. Now I can't deny the fact that I’m a small Lord of the Rings fan and I can't deny that I love RTS games. But I can deny that Battle For Middle Earth 2 is the best thing on the 360. Yes, RTS wise it’s a good game but it still has its negative points. Once again the control scheme, while good, it can't compare to the PC control scheme and i wasn't expecting it to. I was still hoping the controls would be a little bit easier to command when your army is in multiple battles. It’s not. In fact that’s my huge gripe with the game. How the system and game will lag when multiple battles are taking place. A little lag would be common however when you have one part of your army attacking from one side and the other part of your army attacking from the opposite side the game stutters along until you only have one of the battles on your screen and even then it lags a little. Now you really don't have need for a massive sized army on any of the single players until the last mission of which you come into control of a huge army. At this point you might as well settle in for leaving half of your army behind or sending them to fight and not worrying about them. Reason being is very simple, the last mission has a ton of opposition which combined with your army makes the game run slower.

Then the other gripes with the game would be graphically related. The game will sort of freeze and drop frame rate like crazy if your army gets blown up because of all the bodies flying. Then there’s some minor flaws in the games online like the fact that if you do have 4 people in a game one of them will lag out 50% of the time in my experience. The One Ring Mode for the multi-player while fun is also a drawback in my honest opinion. Not that I don't like seeing Gollum run across the map carrying the ring but at times it becomes slightly annoying when it lags and you can’t catch him.

Overall the game is quite fun and yet it still has its flaws. By far it’s not the best game on the 360 and yet in a genre that is not known for working well at all on consoles it stands alone. It has proven that yes RTS games will work on a console but it leaves room for improvement at the same time and not just in the control scheme but in the overall game play of the genre for consoles. So the question becomes more of what outweighs the other. Do the negative things of the game outweigh the good features? In my opinion no. The negative things hurt the game but the fact that EA LA proves with Battle For Middle Earth 2 that RTS games will work on a console is a great improvement and makes the game slightly better. However if you’re not an RTS fan or a Lord of the Rings fan it’s not going to be worthwhile for you to buy the game. If you've never played the genre of Real Time Strategy then it’s worth renting just to check out.