The world of Middle Earth opens up wide with the The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II. Now that EA owns the licenses for both the movie book series, they are free to tell stories that took place while the Fellowship was making its way to Mordor, the forces remaining in the north had to fight their own battles. This is the first game to bring both properties together, bringing a freshness while retaining the fantastic look people have come to recognize from watching the movies. Players now have a chance to use factions that were inaccessible in the previous game, such as the Elves, Dwarves and Goblins.

New factions aren't the only things to change since the first Battle for Middle Earth. While the first game was restricted to following the plot of the movie, this sequel focuses exclusively on the battles left out of the original trilogy. The single player campaign mode tells a pretty compelling story from both the good and evil sides, but the missions are lined up in a fairly generic fashion. Basically, anyone who has had long experience with real-time strategy games will have already played similar missions countless times before. There is certainly good reason to play through the single player elements, but the game doesn't seem to truly come alive here the way it does in skirmish or multiplayer mode.

Significant changes in gameplay have taken place, particularly the open building feature. Players are no longer restricted to specific build points and outposts the way they were with the first game. This allows players to concentrate there forces and spread out their buildings. There will be, no doubt, people who will argue for one system over the other, but we this way allows for people to concentrate around one area and buildup forces instead of rushing out to take as many build-points as possible. The battles are as epic as ever, since the units still build as whole groups. The forces of good have the benefits of superior Elven archery and the mining skills of Dwarves. Evil has a tendency to lean more heavily toward swarming tactics, where goblins even have the innate ability to scale walls.

Of all the unique features to be found here, the resource system should probably be noted first. Players need to build farms and resource buildings in order to up their control count, but their efficiency is dependent on how much open land they have around them, forcing players to spread them out and possibly leaving them vulnerable. While this may initially serve as a means of balancing resource management, it soon becomes an irrelevant, since players can still rely on a strong source of income from inefficient resource buildings. Not to mention, factions such as the Dwarves and Mordor have special powers that boost resource production, further undermining the feature. So, if players can survive the first half of the game without having their farms destroyed, they will have little trouble building and maintaining powerful armies later.

The first Battle for Middle Earth had a living map that allowed players to take areas for bonuses, but the sequel brings the concept up another notch. In War of the Ring mode, players get to play on a fairly straightforward map of Middle-Earth and work to conquer as many territories as possible. Like in a game of Risk, owning entire regions will earn significant bonuses. Each territory has two building slots, so players will have to strategically decide what to build and where. For example, resource buildings will probably be kept to the back while barracks are kept closer to the front lines. However, territory bonuses also play a big role in how the player will decide to build. Once a territory becomes contested, the player has the choice of letting the computer generate results or playing a real-time game. While this is an entertaining feature, it does have the tendency to become tiresome at times because nothing that the player builds outside of the gameboard stays around. So, if an opponent tries to re-invade the same territory, the player is forced to rebuild his base and army practically from the ground up all over again. There are numerous logical reasons for why this has to be done, but that doesn't make the rebuilding grind any more tolerable. You have to reconstruct buildings, retrain armies, and relearn technologies. It would have been nice if more things stayed persistent.