About as much fun as being eaten by a Troll. If not less. (The Lord Of The Rings: Conquest (Xbox 360))

Member Name: Stunt 101

Product:	The Lord Of The Rings: Conquest (Xbox 360)
Date:	28/08/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You can choose from playing as good or evil once you've completed the good campaign.

Disadvantages: It's a piss poor use of the license and a pretty shoddy gameplay experience.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest

I think I've said it way too many times now, but licensed games suck generally. There have been exceptions but yadda yadda yadda. It's been said before so I won't go on about it again. But what has rarely been stated before is that the games based on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films were actually pretty good (except for the one based on the first film of course). EA have been consistent with good quality on their games for Lord of the Rings, though it's been a good three years since we've seen a LOTR game on Xbox. That is, until January of 2009 when Conquest was released. Coming from Pandemic Studios, who need to redeem themselves after the disappointing Mercenaries 2, does Conquest do the movies justice?

Conquest provides two perspectives of plot in the game via two campaigns. The first side of things is the War of the Ring campaign, which follows the Arc of the film where the good guys win and save Middle Earth. It's standard stuff-following the story of the films and not deviating much from the cannon except for some levels like a battle at Minas Morgul. The other side of the coin comes from the Rise of Sauron campaign where instead of following the plot of the film, where the ring-bearer falls, the ring falls to evil and the evil guys generally go through Middle Earth wiping the floor with the good guys. It's an interesting take on providing a different perspective of the books, and it's great that you can choose to live through the plot of the film, though to unlock the Rise of Sauron campaign you have to complete the War of the Ring campaign.

Unfortunately the story is poorly told, where the game recycles clips from the films to tell its story, providing a confusing take on the plot of the film. It's more confusing where the game uses the film clips to tell the plot of the Rise of Sauron campaign which didn't actually happen in the film. Sparse in-game cutscenes don't help either. It's also not very accessible to players who haven't seen the films as it jumps straight into the plot and doesn't guide along the way.The sad thing is that if the plot used cutscenes with the game graphics, then maybe the plot could have been told a bit better. But as it stands, the game tells the plot lazily and in a confusing manner.

And to be honest, it doesn't get a whole lot better from here. You can play the campaign in single player or co-op as well as dip into some online and split-screen multiplayer modes. Gameplay, however, is pretty similar among all the modes. The game focuses on the big military conflicts from the films so don't expect scenes like Gandalf's visit to The Shire from the first film, though you will visit the Shire for some killing as evil in the Rise of Sauron campaign. You start a level, get an object like attack or defend an area and defeating certain enemies and keep going until the mission ends. It's linear, meaning there's only one route through the game, though there are a few choices you'll make which can affect your game experience.

There are several classes available from the get-go in each battle. The Warrior is like a hack-n-slash game where you control a swordsman who takes more damage but is relatively slow and has very few abilities, Mages can shoot lightning attacks and heal fellow comrades and use magical attacks, Archers are like a third-person shooter where your arrows can kill grunts in one hit with special magical arrows too but are incredibly weak and easily killed, and the scouts are weak and poor in close combat but can turn invisible and kill most enemies with one hit stealth kills, but if you are spotted you'll likely die quickly. The classes are fairly balanced, though the Mage was probably my personal favourite because the magic abilities at their disposal are rather overpowering. However it will be personal preference as to who you choose, I guess Sam Fisher fans with go with the scout while snipers will pick the Archer. It's worth noting that classes don't differ much whether you're playing as good or evil in the game.

The annoying thing about Conquest is just how little effort has gone into Conquest. It's clear this was rushed out quickly as there are some bugs and glitches in Conquest which pull the game down into the pits of Mount Doom. The most noticable gameplay bug is the poor collision detection, as sometimes attacks completely miss their target despite being right in front of the enemy. The archer suffers from a spotty aiming indicator which will hit enemies despite not colouring the indicator yet misses when the indicator is red. There are also some really annoying bugs like attacks which push you off an edge and into a pit of instant-death and more. These glitches are simply unacceptable and sometimes make the game a lot more frustrating than it should be.

Speaking of which, Conquest suffers from a dreadful learning curve. The game throws you into the action with a bare bones tutorial barely helping you. Enemies will crowd around you meaning it can be frustrating when an enemy attacks you from behind when the camera hides them from the screen. The frustrating parts are when the game ups the difficulty like when you have to defend an area from attacks from Orcs or whatever you're fighting. It can become overbearing and while there is a respawn system which gives you more respawns when you complete objectives, if you die and lose all your respawns you will have to do the whole mission all over again, which is not fun at all. It's even more annoying when you keep dying from cheap and buggy deaths or the frustrating A.I. which ramps up in certain sections to an extreme degree.

Perhaps the only reprieve is when you can play as a Hero or Villian in the campaigns. At specific points in the game you can control heroes and villians such as Gandalf, Gimli, Sauron himself and more. These characters will overpower the grunts in the level and deal out devastating damage with powerful attacks. Unfortunately these come rarely in the campaign levels, where right at the end you get to play as Sauron for about five mintues out of the twenty minutes you've been playing the mission. Some levels don't even let you play as heroes. The lazy thing about these Heroes is that they merely recycle the classes from the grunts and simply add some more unqiue abilities of their own, but it's not enough to distinguish themselves from the grunts, except that they are a bit more powerful and have more health. The only other bits of variety come from controlling Trolls and Giant trees or using ballistas to destroy multiple enemies, but thats not enough.

The disappointing thing about Conquest is how it misues the license. This is mainly on the sound front. Aside from getting the epic soundtrack of the films from Howard Shore still sound great and fit the fights well, giving a sense of epic, even if the frustrating issues wear that down. Aside from that, however, very little is used from the movie, aside from the stolen clips. This is particularly noticable in the voice acting area, which is flat out abysmal. Aside from Hugo Weaving's Elron, there are no voice-overs from the film and the imitators for the characters are no better than poor. Of particular lameness is Aragon and Gandalf's impersonators who sound nothing like the characters from the films. The sound effects are barren with a particularly annoying sound of the arrow firing when playing as the archer, it sounds like a clock constantly ticking.

The graphics, while slightly better in terms of staying true to the film, don't impress. Levels are bland and barren with cardboard cutout characters in the background supposedly resembling an epic war but looking more like a high school play. The colours are incredibly bland with dark primary colours and bland uses of greys and browns. There is credit due because it manages to fit a good amount of enemies on screen at once without slowdown but considering most of the character models look the same, it's not that impressive. Animation is stiff and jolty, especially when trying to achieve combos with, say, the warrior. Cutscenes in-game look worse in terms of animation with no mouth animation to speak of at all, which is early Playsation 2 era graphics.And using in-game clips to tell it's story is rather lazy, though using more of the in-game cuscenes wouldn't have been better.

The online, lets you play through the campaigns co-operatively or instead just go into a variety of multiplayer modes. You can play standard deathmatch and team deathmatch with grunts or spice things up with heroes deathmatch where players control heroes and villains rarely used in the campaign. There's also capture the ring (or capture the flag) and Conquest which is basically a territory control mode. There are plenty of players online and rarely did I have any latency issues. But the forgetful gameplay sadly comes over into the campaign, meaning it's not very fun. Also there's a potential loop-hole in the online where scouts can simply go around stealth killing everyone without being seen by other players, unbalancing the online play. This doesn't help the games poor value for money with the campaigns taking four hours altogether and sparse and forgettable achievements (aside from the one where you are asked to kill 300 hobits in one playthrough on the evil campaign-who doesn't like killing hobbits?)

Is Lord of the Rings: Conquest good, bad or ugly?

While previous LOTR games have been sucessful and rose above the licensed trend, Conquest falls hard suffering from all the problems which come from lackluster licensed games. It's lazy with several gameplay glitches and bugs making the gameplay more frustrating than it should be, it suffers from monotony as the classes on Good and Evil don't feel that different from each other and playing as the Heroes doesn't help, the value for money is lackluster with two campaigns taking four hours altogether and an odd online mode not adding more value for money and more. But by far Conquest's biggest mistep is how little it takes advantage of the glorious LOTR license. It doesn't use the original cast members and were it not for it's stealing of movie clips from the films and the setting and hero characters it uses; it just could have been another historical hack and slash game. And for that reason alone I can't honestly recommend LOTR: Conquest to pretty much anyone.

Then again...it's not as abysmal as...DAMNATION!

Controls: 6
Gameplay: 4
Graphics: 5
Sound: 3
Value: 4
Overall: 4.4

This was released on January 16th, 2009 for Xbox 360, Playsation 3, PC and Nintendo DS. It is rated 16+ for violence and can be bought for £25+

Summary: Lord of the Rings deserves better games as Pandemic disappoints yet again.