The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (2009)

LOTR Conquest made by pandemic studios was a game that captured my imagination when I played a free demo of it many years ago. Last year I picked up a copy from a game exchange / market. In short this game is very similar in concept to the two classics Star Wars Battlefront and SWB2. But it differs in several ways, many of the classes and most of the heroes have different combos to use. But the game is also quite clunky and very imbalanced both in terms of the classes and heroes. Man I wish I could have played this when it actually had a multiplayer population because the campaigns while fun are also repetitive and have several difficulty spikes. One of the cool additions is that in while you have your good campaign where you fight across Middle Earth in several of the major battles of the books and films on the side of Men and elves there is also a campaign centered on Sauron regaining the one ring and dominating Middle Earth.

It is was fun and occasionally frustrating but I imagine that playing this with a friend in co-op or in online matches would be quite enjoyable. Still if you are a fan of lotr and enjoy star wars battlefront gameplay than you may enjoy this.

I really wanted to like this game, it had a lot of good qualities, but this game has done nothing but irritate me to no end

1. The combat is very simple. Warriors and scouts can have three melee combos, archers can shoot arrows and have a limited melee, mages can shoot lightning or melee. Each class has a series of special attacks and actions, warriors can block, can charge while covered in flames, do a spinning move or use an area of effect attack and break blocks; archers can shoot multiple arrows, shoot an explosive arrow or a poisonous arrow; scouts can turn invisible, spin their blades, throw an explosive and do several combos; mages can heal, create shields, cause a shockwave or create a ring of fire

2. The enemies have the same abilities as the classes. So everything balances out, right? Wrong! The warriors will block almost everything you can throw at them in melee, you would have to luck out, break their guard or shoot projectiles at them, and yet the enemy AI will almost always not focus on your AI allies and instead just swarm you and juggle you to death

3. The AI allies aren't as useful as they should, because the enemy AI doesn't focus on them and just attack you. They are just distractions for the enemies since they can't take objectives; also this makes the first mission of the Rise of Sauron to be extremely difficult because the enemies they kill don't "count"

4. Due to the enemies focusing on you, this causes the final levels (Which are full of massive hordes of enemies) to focus only on you, killing you over and over by swarming you while your AI allies are trying to rescue you

5. The music is the same from the movies, perfect for the battles you will encounter

6. The heroes are varied and feel distinct from the normal classes, for example Aragorn has more Area of Effect attacks, Gimli has shorter range but hits way harder, Legolas shoots faster plus shoots more multi-arrows and does more damage, Gandalf is better in melee than the normal mage plus does more damage and his shield is way better

7. The campaings are short, it has less than ten levels each, but the difficulty makes them feel longer

I don't recommend this game, it is way too short, unfair and difficult for its own good