Under the Knife: The Lord of the Rings Conquest

By Kaiserhawk

(Mages?! FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU)

A long time ago, in a development studios far away came Star Wars: Battlefront. Battlefront was a conquest style game set within the Star Wars universe and many of the levels were based off locales from the films. Both it and its sequel were very successful and became one the top selling games under the Star Wars license. Now Pandemic Studios have opted to trade in their Lasers and Lightsabers for Swords and Sorcery. Will lightning strike thrice with the Lord of the Rings Conquest, or is it a black abomination worthy of the pits of Mordor.

Insert witty caption here

While being a conquest style game there are actually two story campaigns that you can partake in, one for the Forces of Good and one for Evil. These are loosely (And I mean very loosely) based around the Story of the Lord of the Rings starting from Helms Deep to the Black Gate. They take some sidesteps which don’t occur in the books or movies and continue to earn the scorn of Tolkienites everywhere. Once you complete this story you are then granted access to the opposite end of the spectrum and partake in a “what if” scenario where Frodo failed his quest, and evil went on a rampage throughout Middle Earth. It’s a tired idea yes but who really plays these types of games for the story? The whole time I felt that the story was more of an extended tutorial than a fleshed out centrepiece of the game, which in most games would be a cause for concern but as said before in this game it can be overlooked.

The gameplay is deceptively hard. Oh sure you can grasp the controls within the first few hours but there is always something that you’re not doing that could make everything easier such as jumping on a trolls back or Cloaking as a scout then use your charges to knock someone off a ledge. There are three main modes to each map that are Conquest, Team Deathmatch, Capture the ring, or if your map is really special it will have Hero team deathmatch. Conquest involves the usual seek and capture command post game play while your opponents seek to do the same thing. Team Deathmatch is the usual titular gameplay in that you are on a team and you kill the other team. The difference between the hero and normal modes is that you play as the Heroes and Villains of LOTR instead of the usual troops, though this is almost the same since the power level of all the heroes matches each other and feels almost exactly the same as Team deathmatch only with loud mouth heroes prancing around spouting any phrase they may have said in any one of the three movies based on Lord of the Rings. These three modes are alright, the settings are a little light on each, but my main problem with it is that during development of the game we were promised a slew of different game modes, one of which included a mode in which all but one players were Nazguls and hunted down Frodo. This sounded really interesting but when the game was released it seemed strangely absent. I keep hearing the phrase Downloadable Content being harped around but that’s not fair. You can’t promise one thing only to turn around and say that technically you didn’t say it was going to be in the released version. That Pandemic is what we call a dick move.

I really have nothing to say about this picture. It's a fairly standard Screenshot

Graphically the game is competent but bland. Textures are not pushing the boundaries and looking closer to a game of the previous generation than something that can be found on our super console of the future. Also some of the maps are bewilderingly small. Also I don’t see the point of teasing us with large maps on the single player game only to emasculate them on multiplayer and instant action. Another thing is the bewilderingly low amount of units on screen. The maximum number on multiplayer is 16 players, or 8 a side. Sometimes on instant action depending on the map the numbers may change which leads me to wonder why could they not boost the number of units on the multiplayer. You have shown that the game can handle that many units so why not up the number to 32. The musical score is ripped straight from the movies and isn’t really anything special. I wont begrudge the game for this since it is a license game of that movie and Star Wars Battlefront did it as well. Animations are a little hit and miss but it’s not a major flaw. The single player AI is a little on the dopey side because while they will use catapults and an emplaced ballista they tend to shy away from using horses, wargs, Trolls, or Ents. The voice acting is also questionable. Hugo Weaving (Elrond from the movies) does the narration of the story but he was the only performer from the movies to actually voice in this. The others are sound a likes, some being decent while others completely embarrassing the character that they are voicing. The characters that inform you of new objectives in the stories are also woefully bad, the light side in particular. The human sounds annoying and the elf just sounds “fabulous” and the Orc sounds like he’s channelling Warhammer style speech in terms of tone and vocabulary and is one sentence away from shouting “WAAAAAGHHHH”.

Thought you could sneak a little quick time even past us eh lads?

While the game skimps on a lot of things it makes the most of what it’s got. Sure there are not a massive influx of AI bots on multiplayer or instant action like the singleplayer story this could be forgiven due to the unevenness this would cause. Also the gameplay is relatively fun which to many may seem strange as the purpose of playing a game for fun may be an alien concept to many people these days. Sure there are a few lore issues but not everyone gives a toss. I’m sure the addition of a Mage class will not cause the corpse of preachy overrated author who pretty much copied the bible and added a pinch of World War 2 to spin in his grave hard enough to drill to China. If you put a few niggling plot issues ahead of fun then there is something really wrong with you.

MAGES?!?

Overall the game is not a spectacular mind bending experience but it doesn’t need to be. The game is flawed but fun and with the few omissions from a few maps and game modes the game is pretty much what I expected. If you want to jump right into the action you can’t go wrong with Lord of the Rings Conquest. Though the amount you play may either warrant a buy or a rent since the game isn’t that long and you can pretty much blow through the campaign and different map modes within the space of a weekend. I mean I got it on release and I pretty much did everything in one evening with friends on multiplayer. Though the promise of DLC may save the game from a trade in while at the same time I can still scowl at Pandemic for omitting game modes for it.

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