Or so says my review at Strategy Zone.

There is no perfect game, and Battle for Middle Earth II is no exception. But it is one of the best real time strategy games I’ve ever played.

In the end, it boils down to elegance. Battle for Middle Earth II has six races, each with completely unique units. There are two alignments with different power trees. And each race has unique heroes (except for the good and evil super-heroes). All of this could get confusing.

Somehow it doesn’t. The units mostly fit a rock/scissors/paper setup, but this is blown apart by the addition of trolls, heroes and the occasional flying beastie. The counters are usually pretty obvious in any case. After all, only archers can hit the airborne enemies, and heroes usually fit a couple of templates.

And even if you don’t precisely know which counter to use, it probably doesn’t affect your enjoyment because the game is glorious in so many ways. Heroes can take stands against hordes of enemies. Fellbeasts and dragons swoop to attack and then must reorient for their next pass. Tom Bombadil sings and dances your enemies to death.

BfME2, like its predecessor, is more for fans of the movie than fans of the book. There really isn’t enough random Middle Earth lore for your typical Tolkien geek. Things are meant to look good and brave (or evil and devious), so the game is solid evidence that good art design and colorful graphics can affect gameplay. Whatever “immersion” is, the clean look of Battle for Middle Earth II contributes to it.

Now, this is an Electronic Arts game and it is fashionable in some circles to hate Electronic Arts. But they gave me The Sims. And now this. So as far as I am concerned, all is forgiven.

You can read my opinions of Stardock’s hit Galactic Civilizations II in this month’s Computer Games Magazine. You can also read my review of Takeda 2 – a marginal sequel to a marginal original – and my capsule reviews of Star and Crescent and Prussia’s Glory – two wargames that won’t have the broad appeal of GalCiv2.

Like almost everyone else, I say a lot of nice things about the 4x space game. And it was an easy call. Great games usually are.

Writing the review, haggling over the final score for it and exchanging thoughts on the game with other reviewers have cemented in my mind my distaste for the component scoring system. You know the one – those sites that break a game into individual bits like graphics and gameplay and then try to use those small bits to come to a larger score.

There are a lot of things objectively wrong with GalCiv2 as it ships. The documentation has a number of important oversights. It does not Alt-Tab well. Registering the game was a chore made more complicated by overloaded systems as everyone tried to register it. At their best, the graphics are very good; then you have the planetary invasion screens which look terrible. The story based campaign is just not that interesting – even when the bad guys show up with their super weapons. There is no multiplayer.

So, if you have to assign individual scores to graphics, documentation, storytelling, and technical stuff, GalCiv2 drops from the great to the merely good. And you end up missing the best 4x sci-fi game since Masters of Orion 2.

Bruce Geryk wrote the review for 1up.com. As I read it, I was a little surprised at how much it deviated from anything resembling a game review template. Why did he like it again? There wasn’t much I could put my finger on. But the tone of the review was clear. He was enjoying this game. So, we talked back and forth a bit about the little things that got in the way of our thrills.

And none of it mattered in the end. A lot of the same objective criticisms can be made about Crown of Glory, a Napoleonic wargame that quickly wore out its welcome. Like GalCiv2, too much is left under the hood to really understand what is going on. Diplomacy can be a bit wonky. The documentation leaves out some important details. But the difference between the two is huge.

“It’s the gameplay!” I hear you cry. Well, no. It’s not. Since I don’t quite know what you mean by that. The difference is that even when I am floundering around in GalCiv2, I don’t care about all the niggling details. I am given a generous world to explore that doesn’t require I understand everything that is going on. Good design allows a developer to hide some things, explain others and render others completely mysterious. (Personally, I’m on the side of transparency so long as it doesn’t force me to be some godlike accountant.)

CDV has announced that it and Enlight Software are working on a city-building sim set in ancient Rome called Glory of the Roman Empire. Jason Ocampo has a brief preview at Gamespot. Videos of the game are also available at the site.

Ocampo writes “It’s been a while since we’ve had an ancient-city-building game set in Roman times”, apparently oblivious to the fact that this makes three on the schedule for the next year or so. So while it is true we haven’t had one in a while, we’ve been watching the development of a couple for quite some time.

Heart of Empire: Rome from Deep Silver via Paradox will be hitting store shelves in mid-May. Tilted Mill is hard at work on Caesar IV, which we will be seeing some time in the fall.

From this standpoint, it’s not clear what the differences between the three will be. All will be city-builders, all will have trade, limited combat and a scenario based campaign.

The big question for me is “Why Rome, now?” Historical city-builders have always been in short supply, and have almost entirely come from one development house – Impressions. Rome has always been more attractive for game development because of the near universal familiarity with its look and history. And there could be an element of Rome catching, since Creative Assembly’s battle strategy game was a huge international hit, bringing in people who had never played any of the other Total War games.

For the former Impressions people at Tilted Mill, Rome is familiar ground. Their wonderful Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile introduced a lot of new gameplay elements that revitalized a subgenre that really had little new to offer from one civilization to the next.

Since I’ll play anything with togas, all three will make my buy list. I hope they will have something to distinquish themselves from each other. It’s a pain paying 150 bucks for three copies of the same game.