The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II

You can recruit famous heroes, like Gandalf or Sauron, equipped with devastating special attacks; conjure a magical monster (or two) smack dab in the middle of your enemy's base; bolster your defense by hiding in a natural landscape feature like Isengard; or even gain the One Ring and all its power by capturing the wild card Gollum. When you consider that all this and more can be done with six different races, each with its own distinct look and feel, the strategic possibilities start to seem endless. One match in BFME II can honestly feel completely different from the last and next.

Well, as long as you're playing in skirmish or multiplayer mode, that is. The single-player campaign, which depicts the northern front of the War of the Ring that was only talked about in the LOTR trilogy, has a frustrating tendency to hold your hand through every mission. It likes to tell you when to build a base, what kind of army you should train and will even black out certain options to ensure that you follow its preferred tactics. Until the last couple of missions (and there aren't that many to begin with), the entire thing feels like a bloated tutorial.

Still, BFME II spoils you with so much diversity and lovingly crafted detail that it's easy to forgive its shortcomings. The single-player may be over in a day or two, but you'll spend many more happy weeks and months starting skirmishes or challenging friends online. The controls may not be the most intuitive adaptation of keyboard-and-mouse to 360 pad, but you'll likely spend enough time battling in Middle-earth to get used to them… maybe even master them. And if you don't have HD or a large television, you may have to squint occasionally to distinguish an archer from a swordsman, but you'll probably be willing to do that, too.