Lord of the Rings 2 Battle for Middle Earth 2 skirmish and multiplayer review

On Saturday I have had the fun and joy to try out the new Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth 2 strategy game in skirmish and multiplayer. Comments are as follows:

- The AI is very stuffed up: Continuously attacking the same player the whole time. In the first game, the first player was always attacked first. The AI also immediately rushes and then just continues to do so. That very quickly becomes annoying. I thought the rushing could not get worse than WarCraft 3, but it did. The main fortress was undefended and the AI always attacked the wall to the left of it. Building defence towers there just stacked the number of kills, since they just started attacking further left continuously as towers got added next to existing towers.

- As seen with many strategy games, just to make the AI nastier, the AI gets more resources so it builds less resource places and ends up building a lot more troops.

- Those areas for the resource places is also far too big. Everything needs to be spaced too far apart to properly gain resources. By the time there is a fairly decent amount of resources, the resource places have to be built inside of the enemy base.

- Fire arrows are still too powerful.

- Units don't always respond. Formations are mostly useless.

- Memory leaks: Just like the first game, this second game also suffers from memory leaks. My PC with 1 GB RAM ran out of virtual memory and then the desktop was suddenly visible!

- A really annoying feature in the multiplayer lobby caused on player to quit: whenever somebody changes the race or colour, the ready setting of the other players is switched off. After eight times this switching off, the player just left the game. That NEEDS to be fixed! Dawn of War had this done very nicely.

- Those damn annoying videos at the beginning! There are too many of them! There should be an option to switch them off, or to at least be able to cancel them earlier.

- Not everyone is a hardcore gamer who plays a game the whole day for weeks on end.