Navagon: The Battle for Middle-earth 2 is surprisingly good for a licensed game. But personally, I'd recommend you try the
Third Age mod for Medieval 2 instead. Bloody impressive!
I would actually say Battle for Middle-earth 1 was the better of those 2 games, they are both quite good fun though.
Starwars empire at war is another great licensed game if you install the Absolute Corruption Mod. It just makes the battles much bigger in scope and makes the space battles extra special. The ships are all to scale now, so tie fighters and bombers are tiny but you get a ton of them, the largest ships are HUGE. It makes for some really epic space battles in the game close to what you see in the movies with lazers everywhere. It does require a fairly beefy computer to play though with that many units. You can also install the unit cap mod if you want the battles to be even bigger.
[url=]http://empireatwar.filefront.com/file/Absolute_Corruption_mod;97499[/url]
http://empireatwar.filefront.com/file/Unit_Cap_Mod;80345