Everything pictured above? I killed it. Photo by piston9.I recently played through Lord of the Rings Conquest on X-Box 360, and had a solid-gold blast.
The game is a button-mashing affair that pits you against endless waves of enemies.
The game follows the broad story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but neatly condenses it all into short cut scenes. The only parts left are the epic battles, with each level plopping you down on a battlefield in the midst of hundreds of marauding enemies. It's an effective mechanism which allows you to play through Lord of the Rings while skipping everything that isn't wholesale slaughter.
In each level you are given a set of objectives, such as taking and holding an area, killing a leader or disabling a siege engine. These form your real goal and lend strategy to proceedings, stuffed as they are with soon-to-be corpses. I repeatedly failed the first level before realising that victory could not be achieved by killing everything. If you are tasked with collecting something, for example, enemies will endlessly respawn until you've got it.
I played through the game in split-screen mode with a friend, and while it was hellishly fun, I doubt the game would hold up as a solo affair. It's quite shallow and much of the enjoyment is in having someone alongside you to see how badass it was that you just shot an orc in the head with a flaming arrow and he pinwheeled off of Helm's Deep to his doom.
While it's similar to the Dynasty Warriors series, which also sees you fighting entire armies purely to destroy all comers, this game reminded me more of Star Wars Battlefront, as the button mashing is given some depth by the inclusion of a character class system.
When you enter a battle, and each time you re-enter it after dying, you play as an anonymous solider. You can choose to play as a Warrior, Archer, Scout or Mage. Each has their own attack style and suite of special abilities, and it succeeds in adding variety, with each demanding a very different style of play. A warrior charges in and swings his sword as fast as possible, for example, while the archer hangs back and peppers foes with arrows, some coated in fire or poison.
Periodically you will get the chance to play as a hero such as Legolas or Gandalf. Heroes play as turbocharged members of the other classes. They add further variety and give you a nice feeling of power, but's a shame that in two-player mode only one becomes a hero, as it sets up a noticeable difference in power.
One of the main selling points of the game is that, having played through the campaign, you can play through it again as the bad guys. It does feel a little tacked on, as the evil levels are not as fully realised as the good ones, but it's perversely entertaining. When your first mission is to kill Frodo Baggins, a move which spins the story off into a 'What If?" style tale in which the bad guys win, an already shallow experience becomes one of pure fanboy indulgence that's hard to resist. The final evil level sees you in the Shire slaughtering endless waves of defenseless Hobbits. I've always wanted to do that.
As the evilses, you get the opportunity to play as the Mouth of Sauron, the Witch King and the Balrog. It's terribly fun, but the Balrog takes some of the fun out of it by being completely unstoppable and devastating.
Having played through both sides, I can now say that I slaughtered every single inhabitant of Middle Earth. If that appeals to you, you're in the right place. All told, we played through the entire experience in under eight hours, so rent this and pick up some beers, but don't buy it.
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