Good, but not Great
Middle Earth. A land filled with history, strange creatures, and epic confrontations beyond your wildest dreams. It is in this ancient land that one of the greatest stories of all time is set. That story is The Lord of the Rings. It is this epic story of a Hobbit on a quest to destroy the ultimate evil that a series of films directed by Peter Jackson was based on. It is those films that serve as the basis of Pandemic’s new game The Lord of the Rings: Conquest.
Conquest offers us not one, but two campaigns. They are playable co-operatively via split screen or over X-Box Live The War of the Ring follows the basic plot of the novels and the films with some deviations. You will participate in the Battles of Helms Deep, Minas Tirith, Pelanor Fields, Isengard, among others. The game does take some liberty with the films and adds a couple of battles that were not in the films including a full scale battle in the Mines of Moria and the siege of Minas Morgal. The story is told through scenes taken straight from the films which while is poorly cut, adds a sense of purpose to the campaign. The cutscenes are narrated by Hugo Weaving, the guy who played Elrond in the films. Your reward for completing the War of the Ring campaign is the second campaign entitled The Rise of Sauron. The storyline here is what could have happen should Frodo have failed in his quest to destroy the One Ring. The first level casts you as one of the Nazgul battling through Mt. Doom to kill Frodo and obtain the Ring. After you get the Ring, Sauron resurrects all of his evil heroes and begins his war on Middle Earth anew. This is one of the most interesting features of the game. The story is told the same way as the Good campaign using scenes from the film and narrated by Hugo Weaving. It is very interesting seeing the film footage twisted to tell a different story.
Conquest plays almost exactly like Pandemic’s Star Wars: Battlefront games. Players get a choice of four classes to play as and which side they will fight for. The classes are Warrior (Tank class), Scout (Up close and personal class), Archer (Ranged class), and Mage (Support class). Each class has their own unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. You can ride wargs and horses as a means to get around the map faster. Walk up to a dormant troll or ent (tree person) and become them. At certain points in the game, you will get a chance to play as a hero. A hero is essentially a beefed up version of the four basic classes. Regardless, it is still a blast to cut through lines of Orc as Aragorn, hapless humans as the Witch King, and decimate Hobbitses as Sauron himself.
Balance is a huge problem in this game. The class that you think would do the most straight up damage, the warrior, does not. He has the most health, but only does moderate damage. The archer is painfully weak. It takes two headshots to kill anyone at full health save for the heroes who take several shots to the face. The mage on the other hand is ridiculously overpowered. They can heal themselves and those around them, deploy a shield that can block any and all projectiles, create a wall of extremely damaging fire that also slows all that get caught in the flames, and charge up their primary lightning attack to painfully damaging levels. The scout is the most overpowered class in the game. Anyone who plays a scout and barley knows what they are doing can one shot anyone they choose. This is because the scout can cloak, sneak up behind someone, grab them, and shove a knife in their back. Hopefully future patches will fix these balance issues.
Now I have saved the meat and potatoes of this game for last. Multiplayer. There are 3 basic modes of play. There is Team Deathmatch, Capture the Ring (a variation of capture the flag, and Conquest (a territories type game). Multiplayer matches are 8 v 8 with no AI grunts. This is a slight disappointment as maps during the campaign can have upwards of 70 units per side. However, it is still a great time, and matches do not drag on. Heroes become available to the top player the team when you are half way to victory. Heroes can totally turn a match around if your team is the second team to unlock theirs. It makes it so that you never know who is going to win until the match is almost over. This leads to a certain unpredictability that makes every online game a blast. Lag is almost non-existent which is totally awesome.
All in all if you can overlook a few technical flaws and go into the game without any great expectations (as I did), you will have a good time with this game. Balance issues plague the game as well, but they can be overlooked if you know what you are doing. Lord of the Rings: Conquest is a good game. Not great. Not perfect, but good.
