The Lord of the Rings: Conquest

Every year's end is a fantastic time to be playing games. The market contains a nearly endless supply of high quality titles to keep a busy gamer playing until the beginning of the new year. After enjoying high profile titles like Fallout 3, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, and Left 4 Dead, I went into 2009 with high expectations. It's fair to say we're at the half-way point of this generation, so no company has the right to charge full retail price for an out of date game. I played Lord of the Rings: Conquest, and dear God I'm glad I didn't spend money to play that piece of garbage, it totally killed my 2008 buzz.

Once in awhile I play a game that's so mind numbingly broken I often question my own intelligence and dance to the Sun God to make my controller work before realizing the game I'm playing was just poorly constructed. Almost everything imaginable is wrong with this bastardized telling of classic Tolkein, minus the fact the game technically “works” with a good frame rate.

The majority of the problem isn't the fact the game is an obscene train wreck, it's that Conquest seems pretty cool on paper. You got your epic battles, your fiction, your copy and paste Star Wars Battlefront formula, and finally your online multiplayer. Unfortuanitly the game is plauged with mechanical issues, and those “WTF, I totally hit the button, why didn't that work!!!” moments.

Lord of the Rings Conquest is a game that's impossible to recommend, even to huge Lord of the Rings , or Battlefront fans. With its laundry list of issues ranging from control mechanics, to poor textures, to lame-ass fighting, Conquest is an absolute mess and is in no-way worth half of its retail price point. After this and Mercenaries 2, Pandemic seems to be the company with cool ideas, and poor executions.