It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the newest member of the Figures and More family: Brett Pereiras. Brett begins his tenure here with a review of the new Lord of the Rings title: Lord of the Rings: Conquest. Is it worthy of the legacy of the One Ring? Read on and find out

Another year, another Lord of the Rings game.  It seems that game developers have been cashing in on the mega-blockbuster, award winning films since they debuted earlier this decade.  The games have spanned mul

tiple genres, from action to strategy to RPG.  The latest, Lord of the Rings: Conquest, is the second on the Xbox 360. This game returns to the series’ action/adventure roots, courtesy of Pandemic, the creators of the highly successful Star Wars: Battlefront series.  However, if you were looking for a single player or co-op experience that you enjoyed in their previous titles, you might be a bit disappointed in Lord of the Rings: Conquest.  It just seems to be more of the same that we’ve seen from LOTR games for almost 10 years now.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest spans the events of Tolkien’s trilogy surrounding the destruction of the one ring.  You are able to take the side of good, or, if you want, evil, in the quest to destroy the ring, or return it to Sauron so that he can rule over all of Middle Earth.  Much like Battlefront, each level revolves around securing checkpoints, but mixes it up slightly by making you defend these checkpoints for a set amount of time, defeating certain boss characters, such as the Witch King, or Aragorn, or demolishing structures such as towers scattered throughout the maps.

The Battlefront similarities continue with the ability to choose different character classes: Warriors, Archers, Scouts, Mages and, ultimately, Heroes.  Each has their own unique set of attacks, strengths and weaknesses.  The Warriors have great melee combat skills, but poor ranged attacks.  Archers are the exact opposite, allowing you to fire of arrow after arrow at long-ranged foes.  Scouts have the ability to turn invisible and instantly kill an enemy with a stealth slash from behind.  Mages use electric shocks and firewalls to blast through enemies, as well as having the ability to heal themselves and any allies in their immediate area.  Heroes are basically beefed up versions of each class. Legolas, for instance is an archer, only slightly better.

While gameplay is varied across the different types, as with a lot of hack and slash games, button mashing can easily take care of most enemies.  Melee attacks can be linked into combos, but there is nowhere near the amount of combos present in earlier games such as The Two Towers or Return of the King.  You find yourself doing the same combos over and over again whether you want to do them or not.  The gameplay is not as fluid as it should be.  The single player campaign itself can be over in 4 hours, 2 hours given to both the good and evil level sets.  This is pretty pathetic given the length of the movies themselves are considerably longer.  Campaigns in this day of gaming need to be longer, or at least have an interesting multiplayer aspect to keep gamers coming back (which unfortunately in this case, is hit or miss).

Heroes give you almost no advantage over any of the other classes.  They may be better, but the difference is negligible.  I found myself being defeated just as easily as Aragorn as I did as a Warrior.  This does not lend itself to accurate portrayal of the events in Lord of the Rings, since the game tries to pit main characters against each other throughout the game just as they did in the books.  For example, when the Witch King is decimating the battlefield in the Pelennor Fields, the game asks you if you want to change to Eowyn.  Now, you would imagine she would be great against the Witch King since “no man can slay him.”  However, I found myself defeated in mere seconds while trying to take him down with my fire combos.   Another instance of how oddly unbalanced the game is comes from the scout class.  These characters are not the greatest to choose when fighting a large army.  But, using the example of the Witch King, after my Eowyn fell, I took a scout, went invisible and stealth killed him in one hit.  A boss should not be able to be defeated in such a cheap way.

Graphically, the game does a great job recreating the scenes from the film.  You can very easily recognize all of Peter Jackson’s visual interpretations of Middle Earth, from Helm’s Deep to the Mines of Moria.  However, every else is just, meh.  Nothing pops out as great. Colors are bland. Each class type  looks the same.  Warriors have the same faces just different hair color.  Frankly, that is just embarrassing.  The sound and score do shine however.  You will hear familiar music from Howard Shore’s award winning score which swells with the action.  The game is narrated by Hugo Weaving and he does a good enough job setting the story up over video clips from the films.

I must also mention the glitches that may arise as you play through.  My Warrior was attacking a troll, which incorporates running up his back, vaulting over his head, turning around and slashing him in the face.  However, my character leapt too far (which is all automatic I might add) and instead of slashing, my Warrior fell through the stone floor and plummeted down a black screen for 30 seconds before I finally died.  At the time I was defending a checkpoint, which I failed at doing since I was off the plane of existence for half a minute.  That was inexcusable.  Other, more minor flaws, such as frame rate issues and clipping do occur, but I expected that with the sheer massive amount of characters on the screen at once, but it would be nice for a game to not have these problems as they do inevitably hamper the overall experience.

Conquest’s multiplayer is what is supposed to draw people into playing the game.  There is the typical team deathmatch and king of the hill game types that you see in all multiplayer action games.  The game is much more fun on multiplayer, but is essentially the same game as the single player campaigns.  But it is far more enjoyable stealth killing a human controlled character as a scout, than a random NPC amongst the thousands of others found in every level.  I did find it difficult to find a full game; most games had 4 or less people playing.  This made the game not as much fun.

But I guess that pretty much sums up Lord of the Rings: Conquest.  There were more and more things that kept the game from being as fun as it could be.  For every good thing found in the game, such as sound and environments, there are more bad things, like repetitive gameplay and glitches.  I had about 2 hours of enjoyment playing this game, too bad I played it for 8 hours.  It feels more like a cash-in than a great game.  Multiplayer is more fun, but how long can you play with 4 people before you get bored?  Conquest is mediocre, adequate, as average as a game can get.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest gets 3 rings of power out of 5.