Posted: Thursday, July 13, 2006 7:00 pm
Strategy games don’t generally work well on consoles. Companies have tried and for the most part failed. It’s just not the same without a mouse and keyboard.
Finally, though, “Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II” (or “Beef Me Two,” as a friend referring to the abbreviation called it), mostly succeeds where others have failed. “LOTR: BFME II” was originally released on the PC, and now it’s a port to the Xbox 360.
There are multiple ways to play the game. In single player, there are campaign and skirmish modes. The campaigns let you play as either the good side (elves, dwarfs and various others that we cheered for in the books and movies) or the evil side (goblins, orcs, etc.). Skirmish lets you set up a battlefield however you want and start the fight.
The campaign mode follows what was going on while the main “Lord of the Rings” storyline was progressing. You can defend Rivendell from goblins or invade the Shire to take out the Hobbits.
Multiplayer on Xbox Live contains a number of modes, including versus, king of the hill, capture the flag and others.
The part that could have caused the most trouble — the controls — actually works pretty well.
Strategy games are full of menus for commanding armies and building bases. That’s the reason having a mouse is always easier. In “BFME II,” everything is contained within a collapsible menu. Simply holding in the right trigger causes the menu to expand. Then you can use the directional pad to move up and down for categories and left and right for selections within those categories. Hitting the A button makes the selection.
It might not be quite as useful as a mouse, but it’s easy to use and intuitive, and once you get the hang of the category placement, you’ll be throwing out commands left and right. The only problem was sometimes my selections wouldn’t take. I don’t know if I just wasn’t hitting the A button or what, but sometimes I had to go back and repeat what I’d done.
Holding the left trigger and pressing A lets you select whole groups of soldiers, archers, cavalry and others to command, while holding in the left bumper lets you choose individual squads.
Throughout the game you can recruit heroes, who have special skills and can give your troops bonuses in battle.
Graphically, the game looks nice, though it’s nothing particularly impressive. The left thumbstick swivels your view around an axis, while the right thumbstick zooms in and out. There’s a bit of a problem with frame rate slowdown when a lot of troops are on the screen at once, but mostly it runs smoothly.
“BFME II” manages to be a deep strategy game while keeping the controls simple enough that even newcomers should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. Strategy fans with an Xbox 360, whether they’re “Lord of the Rings” fans or not, should pick this one up.
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I knew I was in for a long, strange game when at the beginning of “Astonishia Story,” the main character runs into another character who chides him about pirating software.
What? Aren’t role-playing games supposed to be immersive, character-driven tales of another world? Why is that even in there?
Maybe it has something to do with “Astonishia Story” being a port of a 1994 Korean PC game. Translation problems are apparent throughout, as the dialogue is both choppy and weird.
The biggest problem with the game, though, is its failure to make me care what happens to any of the characters. Most of main character Lloyd’s teammates come and go throughout the game for no apparent reason, and it makes it hard to put effort into leveling them.
The story — getting a magic staff back from an evil queen trying to take over the world — constantly gets put on the back burner by inane, unskippable side quests.
Combat is more tactical than a typical RPG, in the vein of that found in “Fire Emblem.” The battlefield is a grid, on which your characters can move only so many spaces. When they’re close enough to the enemy, they can attack. It’s a fun way to do it, but it’s so simplified that it doesn’t take much brainpower. Even the bosses are laughably easy.
The graphics are a throwback to old-style two-dimensional RPGs, but it fits the game and the system.
It’s a simple RPG that should be easy for anyone inexperienced in the genre to pick up, and it allows you to save anywhere, which is nice. But the weak character development and over-simple combat dull the game into a mishmash of fights that are neither tough nor exciting.
Reach Aimee Green at 473-7326 or Aimee.Green@lee.net.