What we said about it:

Call me jaded if you like, a megalomaniacal game reviewer with delusions of grandeur, or maybe a guy who has just played too many games in the past six years, but in most ways Company of Heroes is really just Warhammer 40K Dawn of War (also by Relic) with a new coat of paint. Certainly many of the most distinctive features of DoW can still be seen in the gameplay. Squads, for example, work as a group of individual units, and when units die you can call in replacement members to bring the squad back up to full strength using the same click interface as DoW. The game also consists of capturing and holding strategic points on the map to gain resources. Company of Heroes is a good game, but not a great game.

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Ultimately, whether you think Rise of Legends is a masterpiece or whether you think it is a hard to swallow piece of fiction with a great strategy game underneath is dependent on how much you admire the backdrop that the creators have fleshed out. For me, the Vinci story and the division into city states reminded me of Italy's historical struggle between the 18th and 19th century to become a single nation. The Arabian Alin and aboriginal Cuotl (just try pronouncing that without the voiceover) didn't really strike home. Thus, I will have to make the latter judgment. This is a great strategy game with a fiction that doesn't quite jive together.

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You might be wondering how EA could produce a sequel to a game which featured the battle for Middle-Earth - the struggle for the One Ring and protagonists like Frodo and Aragorn. Apparently, the answer is the War in the North. While the men of the south are busy defending Rohan and Gondor, the elves and dwarves of the north are fighting their own crusades against Sauron.

The two story campaigns, Good and Evil, are played separately and consist of eight missions in the former and nine in the latter. Those numbers sound low until you discover that completing the broader objectives of a mission - say, assaulting the dwarven stronghold of Erebor - can require several intervening fights and more preparation than you're probably used to in an RTS game. There are no missions limited to a handful of heroes here. Even if it's not on the same scale as the Total War series, Middle-Earth II focuses on large conflicts that often involve hundreds of units at a time.

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Get Battle for Middle Earth II: PC | Xbox 360