YMMV / The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring

• Demonic Spiders: Invisible units like upgraded Elven Archers and Haradrim Slayers. Don't have detection units ready? Enjoy watching your units be struck down one by one without the ability to strike back.
• Fandom Rivalry: With the Battle For Middle-earth series from Electronic Arts, due to being overshadowed by it, and not being movie-based unlike it. Though many people who've played those games may well have played this one too, since it came out slightly earlier, just a year before.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The game was a moderate success, but it was criticized by some fans (including the reviewer for the site Gamespot) for the creative license it took with the lore for gameplay purposes. This was despite ostensibly being based on the books alone instead of the concurrent films. The game has stuff like the different cultures of Men, Elves and Dwarves combined into one faction and fighting together against Orcs, Goblins and Giant Spiders as the other faction. As far as the books go, the armies of Elves, Dwarves and Men never teamed up except in offscreen events (for the latter two), the Giant Spiders never worked together with Orcs, Shelob the giant-est of Giant Spiders at the time preyed on Orcs, and Goblins are just Orcs under another name, not a separate sub-type (even the Uruk-hai supersoldier orcs are sometimes called goblins). Then the Battle For Middle-earth movie-based RTS games came, and the second one and its expansion in particular took similar liberties to the point of deja vu - combining Gondor and Rohan into one faction of Men unlike the first game, and separating Orcs and Goblins into different factions/units, and associating the latter with Giant Spiders (with a type of goblin unit even riding a Giant Spider). The Dwarf faction in the second game onward also has axethrowers for ranged units, akin to the earlier ones here.
• Scrappy Mechanic: When you beat the campaign, it locks your hero units at the level they ended at. An example being that you could beat the game with Gimli at just level 3, but by beating the game, he won't be able to receive experience anymore to reach level 10. This can be a bit annoying if you wanted to play certain levels again without starting the campaign over.
• So Okay, It's Average: It's a decent blend of the mainstream hit Warcraft III and the Cult Classic Battle Realms, but most reviews opined that this meant the game had little else to distinguish itself from them and many other games in the genre other than the LOTR license. In contrast, the Battle for Middle-earth games had somewhat different gameplay, and thus stuck out more. This factor, along with the movie ties, likely led to this game being overshadowed by them.