The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II [X360]

It'll never work. It's just not possible. These are the thoughts we had before entering the demonstration for Battle for Middle Earth II on the Xbox 360, a grand and fast-paced real-time strategy game that relies on wrangling armies for epic visuals and gameplay.

That's right, an Xbox 360 version of an RTS. It's not some watered down action variant of the PC game, but neither is it controlled by some special mouse attachment. It uses that same gamepad you use to play Geometry Wars and Ghost Recon: Advance Warfighter. Louis Castle, executive producer at Electronic Arts, begins by showing off the visuals.

Of course, anyone who's seen a 360 at a Best Buy kiosk knows it can do grand visuals. "This is a visual experience that would cost you thousands of dollars of hardware [on a PC]," Castle says, scrolling around the map. He explains how they're using supersampling to render everything in HD, and subsampling to make it work on a non-HD set. Galloping cavalry, loping goblins, lumbering giants, the lovely golden light streaming through the trees of Lothlorien... I'm sure Tom Bombadil could sing one hell of a song about it all.

But we're mainly wondering how on earth it's going to work. Console attempts at real time strategy have either been centered around a main command unit (Pikmin works this way) or they've crossed the controls with an action game (the underrated Goblin Commander, for instance).

Now Castle is explaining how the Xbox 360 version isn't just a port of the PC version, which you can expect from pretty much any presentation of a ported game. Among the differences are four new multiplayer modes: King of the Hill (control a victory location for the most time), Capture and Hold (control multiple victory locations for the most time), Resource Race (do you spend your money to attack the other guy or save it to get closer to the victory condition?), and Hero vs. Hero (and now for something with a bit of an action RPG vibe).

The setup screen shows that there are many more options for configuring multiplayer and skirmish matches than there are in the PC game. Consider this consolation for not getting the War of the Ring mode, the PC version's clunky strategy meta game. Castle cites interface issues, as well as the fact that War of the Ring might not appeal to the average 360 player. Speaking of interface issues, we're still wondering how on earth this is supposed to work.

But now Castle is explaining unlockable heroes, which are in lieu of the PC version's Create-A-Hero mode. Instead, you'll have a number of custom pre-made heroes. "Buckets," Castle says when asked how many. Some of these are the guys from the PC game, others are mined from Tolkien's lore, and yet others seem to have been invented from whole cloth. Given how powerful these customized heroes can be in the PC game, there should be a lot of incentive to unlock them in the 360 version. "We leaned heavily into achievements," Castle says, referring to the Xbox's unique system of awarding points for accomplishing various in-game goals.

Castle says there is no crossover between the PC team and the Xbox 360 team. They're two completely separate groups. The team doing the 360 version has been laying the groundwork for how to do an RTS on a console for a while. In fact, they've been doing this long before they decided on using EA's newly rounded out Lord of the Rings license that lets them branch out beyond the trappings of Peter Jackson's movies. Their priority was "a re-evaluation of the game mechanic," Castle says, taking up the gamepad again.