Others say...

"Where did the rest of the game go?"
What the heck? Where's the second half of this game? Okay, so it's cookie cutter... okay, so it's a year-or-two late Warcraft 3/Battle Realms love-child... okay, so the graphics are cartoony. Why does the game end where it does? It looks like they took half the missions out of the good campaign!! After some interesting "prequel missions" that take place before the books, you hop right into a mission with the whole fellowship at Lothlorien, battle at Helm's Deep, and fight a couple of extra-canonical battles. ***BUT*** there's no Moria, no Minas Tirith, no Return of the King events at all. Even more perplexing, Moria even appeared in a development screenshot I saw, but NOT in the game I purchased--the only FOTR event is a fictitious battle in Lothlorien (where golden trees drive orcs "mad"?). There's no Emyn Muil (is that where the first book ends?) so you'll lose Boromir with no explanation. Faramir shows up for 1 battle and that's it. The hobbits also show up for 1 mission (almost without purpose). What's even more perplexing is that the overhead map, that lets you choose where to fight, displays locations you'll never get to! It shows a tiny little Isengard, a tiny little Minas Tirith, a tiny Mt. Doom and Barad-Dur, and what looks like Elrond's house. You'll never see any of these. It seems odd that they'd go outside of the books for extra material, but not include the most interesting parts that are ALREADY THERE for them to do. Just plain weird. I don't know if it feels thrown together or rushed or what, but there's no excuse for making up a bunch of odd extra-canonical missions (after Helm's Deep Aragorn captures Minas Ithil?) and leave out the most interesting stuff.

The only thing I can think of comapring this to would be a game based on Star Wars Ep. 4, that includes lots of story about Luke's childhood but ends with him rescuing Leia and completely ignores the big space battle at the end. It seemingly aims to strike "around" the material covered in the books and avoid the actual events from the story (which is what we're paying for, right?). It just leaves you asking "why?" and looking for a better game.

"good not great"
war of the ring is a fun game. But i just got the battle for middle earth, and it is 10000000000000000000x's better than war of the ring. The graphics don't even compare bfme is much better then wotr. The levels r more fun and better. the ai can be really smart if difficulty is set to hard. So don;t get this game, get battle for middle earth you will enjoy it much much more. I used to play war of the ring non-stop before i got battle for middle earth, but now i don't even know where bfme is and i don't care. All i care about is battle for middle earth. Buy battle for middle earth and not war of the ring. Trust me. :)

"Less Than Stellar"
When I heard that there was going to be a Lord of the Rings, RTS (Real Time Strategy game) I was excited after having played the Microsoft game, Age of Mythology which was also a RTS and I got the expansion to that and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I thought, if the gameplay is like Age of Mythology, or uses the same engine with good graphics and no lag during offline play, then this game could be really fun. So I bought it and I put it into my computer, it pulled up and I started playing it. From the first time I played it, it lagged and I found the graphics to be... to put it lightly, less than stellar (refer to the title of my review). However, the gameplay is solid enough, and it retains the Lord of the Rings feel enough for it to be given an "okay" rating. Recently, another Lord of the Rings RTS came out (Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle-Earth), and I've found it to improve in every aspect on the other game. Much like Warcraft, it's a "build and army and conquer" type of game. However if you like RTS games, I suggest Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle-Earth over Lord of the Rings: The War of the Ring because of the lag and graphics. So overall, I've found War of the Ring to be mediocre and Battle for Middle-Earth more worth my money, and time as well as yours.

"Pretty good game"
This game is pretty good. The bad thing it only has two tribes. I've played the game and it has alot of action and vilence so if your a war kind of person i would get it.

Overall it's a must get game

"Gandalf can't do anything to make this game better"
Alright, so the Lord of the Rings series is a big francise. We got movies, video games, costumes, websites going on and Battle for Middle earth which looks awesome. Now War of the Rings, I hate the grapics first and foremost. I mean they were absolutely terrible! Then, no original voiceovers from the movie! Sierra was to busy writin' a "great" review for the release. But whats the point if we don't have good voiceovers. I must admit, that some of the units for all of them were neat like the trolls and Rohan horsemen, and I loved the blood and powers you could choose. But, I hated the opening movie and the storyline. It was hardly even like the movie! In short terms, I hated War of the Ring for the PC!

-Game Dude