Impressions: Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II

Here's an impression for you, loyal readers of this here blog: This game is shit.

I mean, really awful. So bad that you are literally (and figuratively, if that is even possible) better off renting Xanadu and dancing around your apartment like a freak on speed than renting this game and hoping for more than the easy 10 achievement points gathered from the first stage, along with a healthy dose of boredom. Ok, so I perservered through the second stage (in hopes of getting more Gamerscore), but while I held out through two (count 'em, two!) playthroughs of Eternal Sonata, I seriously could not bring myself to continue with this game. It was insanely laggy, as though I was playing online in a dial-up connection, even though it was single player and not online. And when the Xbox can barely run your totally mediocre game, something is horribly horribly wrong.

Beyond the lag that made my army stutter across the screen, the game was just plain boring as all hell. I was bored, my roommates were bored, even my Xbox360 was emitting a high-pitched plaintive wail, begging me to release it from the torment of running this game. Or maybe that was just the bastardized version of the excellent LOTR soudntrack, crying into its milk. At the end of the second stage, a "Watcher" rose up from the ground to assault my army. It was a giant squid thing (like the one outside of the Mines of Moria in the first movie) and apparently it summoned a lake with it when it rose from the depths of a snowy mountain. Riiight. Regardless, I was clearly meant to use archers to attack it, as it had flailing limbs that threw any of my foot soldiers across the screen if they got remotely close to it. Unfortunately, there was almost no way to tell the archers from the foot soldiers because the screen was so ridiculously jumbled, and even when I did, I am not sure there was even a way to select all of my archers to make them attack it. What I ended up having to do was move all my guys far enough away that the foot soldiers stopped committing suicide and the archers got bored and moved forward automatically to shoot the squid. Ghey. What's the point of me playing if I have to manipulate the AI to play?

So, I finished the first two stages, getting the achievements for completing all objectives for each stage, plus the one for buying my first power. 15 points and the game took 5 days to get to me. OMG GameFly, sometimes you make it so easy to hate you. I went and wrote a bad review of the game so that others are not suckered in by that 6.7 rating I saw. 6.7 my lily white ass.

Here's to the next game being better. Oh wait, it's DMC4 (for xbox 360 this time!!). Of course it will be better.

P.S. - My boss thinks I'm hot.