This page will contain reviews of LotR: Conquest. 

 

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest Review

Frodo and his fancy little ring are back yet again.

 

January 13, 2009 - My generation probably won't see anything emulate the success of Star Wars as successfully as The Lord of the Rings franchise. The rampant fan following that followed each movie's release and the subsequent DVD launch is rivaled by few which speaks volumes for the films' creators' abilities to bridge the large gap between the fantasy world and that of popular culture.

Now Electronic Arts and Pandemic are trying to take the spirit of the movies and toss them into The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, a game clearly inspired by Star Wars: Battlefront on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2. Thankfully it's the near perfect use of the franchise that is the game's silver lining; it's just too bad that the core design can't quite stack up.

Conquest takes the predictable approach of allowing you to play through two campaigns; eight levels for the forces of good and eight levels as the armies of Sauron. The good campaign needs to be completed before the evil opens up, and thankfully the more diabolical of the two wins out in terms of fun. The premise for both is identical: players choose one of four classes (warrior, archer, scout or mage) and then must complete a set of objectives to clear the level. More often than not you'll get to play as a hero you'll recognize from the films, but let his life bar slip back to zero and you're stuck choosing from the four standard classes each time you go belly-up.

Bring the pain with our Video Review (HD Available).

In other words, the design is identical to Star Wars: Battlefront. There are mounts that you can hop on like Ents, trolls and steeds, depending on which campaign you're playing. My main issue with this design is the redundancy of it all. All too often I felt myself tapping the same sequence of buttons, no matter which class I chose. Every character uses three face buttons as the main attacks with some sort of modifier that makes use of magic to power-up your attacks. There are slight variations from class to class, but the experience is redundant. Not helping is the fact that the classes are identical across both campaigns and the heroes are little more than core class characters on steroids.

Moreover, the combat is pretty damn clunky. Throwing combos is something that's built into Conquest but there are no breakaway animations or preloading possible when fighting. What that leads to is a painful pause as you are forced to wait for the previous move to carry out. Slamming buttons and seeing no result can be a bit frustrating and it happens often in LOTR:C. It's not that the fighting system doesn't work; it's that it was poorly designed.

He is Gandalf!

Where Conquest hits its highest note is in its emulation of the classic environments from the films. All eight missions in each campaign are easily recognizable as famous battles from the film. It's great to play as Legolas and bring down an Olephant for the first time, but just like many other things in Conquest, it gets stale soon after the first quicktime event. Luckily the bad guys get much cooler heroes such as Balrog who gets to bring down Gimli in the Mines of Moria mission and slaughtering fifty hobbits in the final stage.

The expected narrative is delivered from Hugo Weaving and features clips from the film. It's decently presented but could have been stronger in the evil campaign which puts a new spin on The Lord of the Rings. Once Frodo drops the ring into Mount Doom at the end of the first eight levels, the story is rewound and told as if Frodo kept the ring for himself. That's how Balrog gets away with killing Gimli, you get to burn down the Shire and take down Minas Tirith.
 

But for all the mediocre gameplay that is dressed with cool moments from the films, The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is about its multiplayer. Sixteen players can take part in three modes: Team Deathmatch, Conquest and Capture The One Ring. The best is, unsurprisingly, the titular. Conquest places four flags around the environment and each team's point value increases faster and faster as they gain more and more flags. Teams can earn heroes by gaining all the flags at once, and it facilitates the small strategies that are possible with each class.

Yes, while they may not be all that inventive, there are indeed strategies that you'll see employed in multiplayer and they're essential for success. Mages can use their range shield to house several archers and keep them safe from projectiles. Scouts can charge in behind warriors and use their cloaking ability to assassinate heroes with one quick button press. It's cool when it works, but the options for strategy are ultimately limited. And while you will see players working together, the artificial intelligence is usually just plain stupid; commonly staring at enemy AI soldiers as if performing a sort of timed strike.
Check out LOTR: Conquest action in this gameplay clip (HD Available).

In the end the multiplayer, to a lesser extent, is hit by many of the same pitfalls as the single-player, which is to say that it gets redundant a little too quickly. Its different modes help, but the actions you're performing are the same. It would help if there was some sort of leveling or ranking system for players to earn new pieces of armor or abilities, but sadly there is absolutely nothing of the sort.

Graphically, The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is clearly built for multiplayer, which is to say that it's not exactly impressive. The best looking piece to the puzzle is the environmental sets that feel like they were designed by Peter Jackson himself (no doubt, they were). It's a bummer that everything is unimpressive. Textures are smudged and smeared around and character models could be much smoother and higher resolution. The framerate hitches on occasion and smoke has an odd effect on characters it surrounds.

That's a huge *****!

Luckily the sound performs at a very high level throughout thanks largely to the inclusion of Howard Shore's fantastic theme that thumps throughout the action. Things roll steadily downhill from there with Hugo Weaving delivering a decent performance at the beginning and end of each mission while the mid-level work from Aragorn and Gandalf imposters falls absolutely flat.

Closing Comments
The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is a straightforward affair with very little that will pleasantly surprise anyone who played Star Wars: Battlefront. Its combat and general mission structure is by-the-books and the lack of expandability and feeling of redundancy are felt instantly. Withstanding all of that, Conquest still somehow manages to earn merit on its expert use of The Lord of the Rings license. The environments feel like they're straight from the silver screen and Howard Shore's multiple orchestral pieces are great to fight alongside.

Diehard fans of both online, class-based games and The Lord of the Rings might want to invest the sixty bucks, but if redundant and unimaginative gameplay are things you despise, you'll want to steer clear.

 http://www.oxmonline.com/article/reviews/xbox-360/g-l/lord-rings-conquest

Posted on: Jan 13, 2009

Lord of the Rings: Conquest

WORDS BY: Ben Talbot

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.

On Xbox 360
4.0
  • Multiplayer passes the time; plenty of levels.
  • Battles are too small; frustrating mission failures.
  • Combat system is poor.
  • Was anyone really just sitting forlornly by their 360, hoping for a new Lord of the Rings game?