4/10
This review is from OXMONLINE.COM
This never happened in the movies. As we were escorting Frodo through Minas Tirith, he was grabbed by a troll and thrown through the air like a pebble. Seeing his lifeless corpse bounce off a rooftop was actually quite amusing. Being forced to replay the level from the start — for something we barely had a chance to prevent — was not.
A capture-the-rally-points and do-other-lovely-chores snoozer that’s extremely reminiscent of the Star Wars: Battlefront series, Lord of the Rings: Conquest is full of frustrating moments like this. Though you’re given a generous number of lives with which to complete each campaign mission, many scenarios cause missions to end instantly. The most common one is being killed when you’re protecting a key location: the time it takes to choose your character and respawn means that the positions are often overrun before you have a chance to fight back.
Battling Olyphaunts and siege weapons at Pellenor Fields is also a headache. You have to be in precisely the right position before you can attack them, or else the context-sensitive buttons just don’t appear.
Theoretically, engaging in epic pitched battles like Pellenor and Helm’s Deep should be a thrill. But sadly, we’ve seen bigger and more exciting fights at the mall during post-holiday sales. Conquest lacks drama because at the most, you’ll see about 20 to 30 enemies onscreen at a time. There seem to be hundreds of foes off in the background, but they’re impossible to get to and might as well be cardboard cutouts.
Playing as the ranged character classes — the mage and archer — is reasonably similar, although the aiming seems a little twitchy. It’s when you play as the hack-and-slash classes — the warrior and scout — that frustration digs in. Cutting through orcs and uruk-hai is easy enough, but it’s nearly impossible to do it without suffering tons of damage in the process. You have lots of useful combos but no lock-on options, and the blocking system is so vague that it’s hard to tell if you’re actually defending yourself. Most fights involving the warrior are a war of attrition, relying on having enough lives to see you through.
Campaign mode is also a disappointment, even when you get to play as Sauron’s orcish horde. Summoning the Balrog and riding an Olyphaunt are highlights, but the game just fails to create any drama. The battle between Saruman and Gandalf involved shooting lightning bolts at each other for five minutes. Sob.
Multiplayer is a slight improvement, mainly because it feels competitive and you don’t have to worry about tedious objectives that seem like they’re shoehorned in. These 16-player matches go back to conquest and flag-capturing basics, and with twice the number of players, they actually could have been quite impressive.
It’d be too easy to say that Conquest will appeal only to diehard Tolkien fans; in fact, they’re the ones most likely to hate it. The next time we go back to Middle-earth, we really, really hope it’s because the epic RPG that this license so richly deserves has finally been made.
There is NO AI in multiplayer, and the maximum AI in singleplayer is 8V8. BATTLEFRONT 2 had MORE NPC's.
It's a real shame, Pandemic have cocked up another game, in the same way as George Romero is on his 3rd strike, I would say Pandemic is too.
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