Very few people have had the level of impact on me that J.R.R. Tolkien has. From the moment my dad introduced me to the Lord of the Rings series, it was over. I was hooked and looking for anything I could get my hands on related to it. This eventually ended up including video games. The EA action series based on the movies were among my favorites, but no Lord of the Rings game has ever come close to matching Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth II, their real-time strategy game for PC.
Lord of the rings was always meant for a rts
There has never been a more perfect melding of a video game genre and IP than the RTS and Lord of the Rings. Never. And we got two games in this series. Both of them classics but Battle for Middle-Earth II took everything the first game did and turned it up to 11. The best part of this game was it was part of EA’s deal with the Tolkien estate to create games that were in the Lord of the Rings universe but were original stories.
And they knocked it out of the park. The visuals, the sounds, the characters (Tom Bombadil’s weird ass even gets some run), all of it felt true to what I had come to know. The gameplay was standard RTS fare, build your base up, get your troops ready and lead them to battle while maintaining your base area. Battle for Middle-Earth was just such a technically sound RTS with a clear respect for the source material, that it stood head and shoulders above the rest for me.
You could play either the good campaign or an evil one, each coming with their own unique story. And they even got Hugo Weaving to reprise his role as Elrond throughout. Outside of the campaign, you could do skirmishes in the game and play as either good or evil, with either Galadriel or Sauron at the heads of their respective factions. And if that wasn’t enough, you could kill Gollum. In fact, it was encouraged. That’s right. If that little imp popped up on your screen, you were incentivized to go after him and take him out. If you did, you would come into possession of the One Ring and be able to summon your faction’s insanely overpowered hero.
Should we run it back?
I’ll put it like this, I’ll be doing these Runbacks for as long as I can think of games. But if I were ever in a “this is my last one” situation. This would be the game I would close with. There is no game that exists that I want back more than Battle for Middle-Earth. I actually still own the game. But I also don’t want to shell out the money for a laptop with a disc drive at the moment. So, I’m holding out hope that the good folks over at GOG are working behind the scenes to bring this back. Because I will buy it day one with no hesitation. And if not, after a certain period of time, yeah, I’ll grab a laptop with a disc drive so I can get back to it. Run this the hell back.
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