My not so precious (The Lord Of The Rings: Conquest (Xbox 360))

Member Name: sim721

Product:	The Lord Of The Rings: Conquest (Xbox 360)
Date:	04/02/09 (162 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's Lord of the Rings

Disadvantages: It nearly destroys everything good about the films and books

I've had mixed emotions about this game. I could be playing it and having the most fun ever, then suddenly realise, wow this is rubbish, and to be truthful, it is.

Lord of the Rings conquest uses an upgraded version of the engine from the game Star Wars Battlefront 2 (or so it says) but puts a Lord of the Rings skin over the top. This story has you start with a simple training mission set during the war against Sauron and gives you some good knowledge to get going with such as the different moves that each class can pull off and the abilities of heroes.

The actual game missions start at the battle of Helm's Deep. I remember having so high hopes of this game and was expecting a huge battle scene with hundreds of troops on each side fighting it out. But I guess I'm going to have to wait a bit longer for something like that, it seems that the developers decided to have about ten on ten battles and I think so much more could have happened.

The location is really small and if you've ever watched the films you will remember that Helm's Deep was a huge fort against the enemy but the game version means you are able to see the entire map from the very start. It appears they tried to make it all look a bit grander by having thousands of Orcs and Urak-hai in formation in the distance but completely unresponsive. To me this makes the whole thing look really "tacky" and was another big let down. All the missions follow pretty much the same formation making you either, hold a point for so long, capture a position from the enemy, or kill an opposing hero and it all gets very repetitive.


In each level you are given a number of lives to play out and on each respawn you are allowed to pick a class to play as. These are your choices:

Warrior

Archer

Mage

Scout

Unfortunately for the game though, by the end of the first level the player will of found out that there is only one decent class to play as and will stick with that for the entire game. With Lord of the Rings the only decent character is the archer during the main story. They can do huge damage if you hit enemies in the head, do not have to build up power like other classes to use their special abilities (fire arrows, poison arrows and multi shot) and are the only ones capable of killing blocking warriors.

What's wrong with the others then? Well the warrior is just impossible to defend with and will get completely overwhelmed. And come up against another warrior and your better off running away as there is no way in hell you can hit them.

The mages aren't too bad. They have the ability to block all incoming projectiles which is useful online, but as an actual attacking character they are too weak.

The scouts again aren't too bad, however they have very poor damage. On the other hand they have satchel charges which can do a lot of damage, and the ability to cloak themselves and run up behind enemies and instant-kill them, but this is extremely hard to pull off, and in the time it takes you to get behind them and kill them you could of killed them with two arrows to the head.

What really upset me about the game, was the fact that they used film footage instead of screenshots. Along with this they had decided to make up loads of battles that never existed. So imagine if you will, being a huge fan of the movies like me, having watched them every few months (the extended editions aswell) and knowing what every scene is about. Then this game comes along showing random footage that doesn't even match what is happening on the screen and uses it with no thought about what it actually meant in the film. This problem was even more apparent during the second campaign of the game.

After completing the War of the Ring campaign, which loosely (very loosely) follows the film's plot, you unlock a second campaign called "Rise of Sauron". In this campaign Frodo has succumbed to the power of the ring and decides to keep it for himself and the story is set around you resurrecting such characters as the Witch King and Balrog and reigning terror among the inhabitants of Middle Earth. I admit I found it much more fun than the first campaign as it was nice completely destroying how the film ended. (After all the first campaign completely destroyed the film, all that was left was the ending). Back on to the film footage problem though. This means they used more footage from the film to represent a complete different ending and turn of events. They even used the same footage as the good campaign, it was just completely unbelievable to watch, I don't know whether it was stupidity or laziness that drove them to this method of storytelling, probably both.

Well rant over, here's some more technical information.


-----The Graphics-----

I think more effort went into the meetings where they decided how much they were going to rip people off by selling them this game, then actually went in to designing it. There was a scene in the evil campaign where I was shown a bit of game footage of a small person in a cloak and told to kill him, I had my suspicions as to who it was, but I had to wait till the game actually told me it was Frodo before I could believe how bad he looked, it was if they took a picture of him and stuck it in a blender and then said, "right that's another character done, who we destroying next." The level design isn't that much better. The whole experience is very linear considering it's meant to be a huge battle game, the same repeated texture has been used on multiple levels and it all looks worthy of the original Xbox.


-----Music and sound-----

One of the only good points is that they did use the proper music. It obviously doesn't make up for the poor level design and animation but it does make playing the game a tad more enjoyable. Before one level I was almost fooled in to believing that it was going to be really good by the music. As for the voice acting, Pandemic decided to make the classic mistake of recording about two lines of dialogue per character class and then have them repeat the same line over and over and over and over (and you get the picture), but wait a minute, this is the company that made Mercenaries 2, a game they made the exact same flaw with. The same lines repeated again and again, countless times, guess not everyone learns from their mistakes.


-----Online play-----

I was actually looking forward to playing this online. About a week before the game came out, a demo came out on Xbox live which allowed the user to play on two different levels with another 15 players, (8 on 8) and they had to compete to capture points. I genuinely had fun playing this as it was much better than playing the stupid AI that the main story pits you against. Apparently they don't see any of your teammates and ONLY go for you, ALL the time.

So high hopes I had. I loaded the multiplayer screen, pressed ranked match and waited for a game, about 30 seconds later I entered a game lobby to be joined by one other player. Waited a while. Now there was only me, the other guy had gone off somewhere, probably bored of waiting. I thought maybe I had a dodgy connection so tried finding another game. In fact I tried finding another 20 games. I've also been trying for several days now. Nobody plays this game online. I have managed to get into a game of 2 on 1 so far and so it means what could of been a really fun mode is destroyed by lack of support from the community, which I don't blame. You don't spend £40s on a game to play it online.


-----Summary-----

This game could of been so much more, it could of had battles with hundreds of troops, it could of had beautifully designed levels with lots to look at, and it could of had a decent story to tell, the Lord of the Rings could of been a good story to tell, but I guess they preferred to make their own up.

Pandemic studios definitely hasn't learned from its mistakes with Mercenaries 2 and I doubt they will with this game.

1 Star


-----Game Information-----

Players 1-4 offline 2-16 online (you won't be able to find that many though)
60kb to save
Supports all HDTV settings and dolby surround sound (doesn't deserve to though)

Summary: Thanks for reading