The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II is a real time strategy game. It is similar to Age of Empires and Command and Conquer games as far as gameplay is concerned. There are 2 campaigns where you can play as either good or evil, with each side having their own strenghs and weaknesses and their own hero's. If you play both campaigns it takes a good few hours and they are challenginf enough to keep you entertained, but the real selling point of the game is the Online battles. You can go online and join a game that is being set up by someone else by setting your search to find a gma eyou want to play or you can create you are own and set some of the rules. Once you ahve created your game you can either invite some of your friends or just wait for someone to join at random. LOTR: BFME II is a good game by all accounts it has a good campaign mode and a brilliant online mode. Most of the replay value is in the online mode as once you have completed campaign there is not challenging enough to replay even if you crank up the difficulty level. It is well worth a look but only if you like real time strategy games, fans of other LOTR games like Conquest may not like this one so much so it may be useful to rent it first.