The Lord of the Rings film trilogy grossed over $US3 billion dollars at the box office, won 17 Academy Awards and made cult horror director Peter Jackson a household name. Electronic Arts rode the wave of success with a number of licensed titles, and now they’ve come back for another helping with Lord of the Rings: Conquest, a multiplayer focused hack and slash inspired by developer Pandemic’s most successful series to date, Star Wars: Battlefront.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest is focused on the big battle scenes that featured in the films. Players choose to side with the forces of good or evil, and then must select one of four different classes – Warrior, Archer, Mage and Scout – before charging into battle. You’ll partake in many of the most crucial battles from the War of the Ring such as defending the fortress at Helms Deep, assaulting Saruman’s tower at Isengard, and even purging The Shire with Sauron’s forces. The game is broken into single player and multiplayer portions – the basic gameplay is the same, though the mission structure is not.


The single player side of things offers basic training and two campaigns, The War of the Ring, which follows the film trilogy closely as you play as the good guys from the film, and The Rise of Sauron, where you orchestrate the return of Sauron, starting with the defeat of Frodo at Mount Doom. Realistically, it’s just a case of running between points, completing the same objectives repeatedly before moving onto the next map. That said, the Rise of Sauron campaign is far more enjoyable, particularly for the more macabre gamer who enjoys chopping up helpless fleeing hobbits.

Multiplayer, on the other hand, sticks very closely to well established contests and game types, offering up straight up Hero Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Ring and Capture and Hold missions. Electronic Arts has set up a larger cluster of dedicated servers for each game type, but as they’re hosted in the United States, Australian players are at a distinct disadvantage.

Most of your time with Lord of the Rings: Conquest will be spent controlling one of the nameless grunts, cutting up or blowing apart anything that gets in your way. Each class has their respective strengths, weaknesses and special powers. The Warrior is the best for up close and personal combat, and can use flame attacks. The Mage can hit several players at once with chain lightning, protect other players (and himself) with a large force field and stop the advance of troops with a deadly firewall. The Archer is ideal for picking foes off at a distance – head shots will take out your enemies instantly, but fire, poison and multi-arrow shots are provided for a bit of variety. Finally, the Scout is a nimble character with fast fighting moves and the ability to become invisible and land an instant kill attack on any enemy (which is particularly useful for heroes).


There are two other tiers of playable characters which appear at certain times during the battle depending on your performance and the location of the fight. The next tier of characters includes the Ents, Trolls and Oliphants, which act kind of like the game’s vehicle equivalent, offering up a dramatic increase in destructive power and protection in exchange for becoming an easily identifiable target.

The top tier of characters is comprised of your hero types – Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Eowyn, Elrond and Gandalf on the side of good, and Sarumon, the Nazghul, the Witch King, the Mouth of Sauron and the Dark Lord Sauron himself on the evil side. You’ll be offered the opportunity to take control of a hero after accomplishing certain tasks on the battlefield in single player, or for good performances in multiplayer (except Hero Deathmatch, where everyone controls a hero). Each hero corresponds to one of the four main classes, but the differences lay in their extra abilities. For example, Aragorn effectively follows the Warrior class, but the fire sword is replaced with moves that exploit the King’s pact with the Army of the Dead. One must strive to keep the hero alive for as long as possible, as once they are defeated, they’re out of the current battle.
Once you’re on the field of play, Lord of the Rings: Conquest’s flaws stick out like an Ent among Hobbits. The combat is mostly bland and uninteresting; single player throws endless numbers of grunts at you while your comrades sit around and do nothing, while multiplayer is a total mage-fest, due to sheer lack of balance between classes. The Scout class in particular is totally crippled, because other players can see you as clear as day when you’re meant to be invisible. There are many situations that will really irritate players such as being unable to get up off the ground because you’re vulnerable the second you start to rise, or taking control of a hero character only to be instantly swept up by a Ringwraith or giant bird without any kind of warning. Other things are just really absurd – players will die when they come into contact with water of any kind. This is unintentionally amusing when it happens to someone playing as Sauron – who knew the Dark Lord could be defeated with a knee deep pond of water? Melee combat is a big issue when it comes to dealing with any kind of latency; all too often you will find yourself slain, despite the fact it appears that you landed significantly more blows on your opponent. EA’s running at least 16 dedicated servers per match type – would it have killed them to have one or two down here?


Lord of the Rings: Conquest is pretty lacking from a technical perspective as well. The press releases touted the involvement of Weta, Peter Jackson’s special effects house which did all of the fancy work in the movie, but the end result raises doubts as to their level of involvement. The game looks very rough; sure, it looks like Lord of the Rings, but it doesn’t bear the level of detail you’d expect to see on current hardware. It doesn’t seem like Pandemic gave their game engine much of an upgrade in the last 3 years – other than the obvious increase in resolution, the environment detail, character model quality and animation are all roughly consistent with Star Wars Battlefront 2. Howard Shore’s excellent orchestral score makes for good background music during each encounter, though the budget didn’t stretch enough to get the main cast back in for voice-overs (apart from Hugo Weaving, who provides narration), with some very flat sound-a-likes providing half-assed impersonations of your favourite characters. There’s also a painfully awkward announcer who spoils much of the authenticity of your battles.

By following the mould of the successful Star Wars Battlefront series, one could have expected that Pandemic’s Lord of the Rings: Conquest would have been on the same level of quality. Instead, where Battlefront was big, bold and varied, Conquest is short, unimpressive and extremely flawed. Strange design decisions, latency issues and distinct lack of balance destroy the potential offered by the game’s single player and multiplayer aspects, and poor visuals and low production values really spoil the game’s presentation. Lord of the Rings: Conquest fails to meet fans’ expectations or do justice to the license.