Product Description

Lord of the Rings: Conquest X360

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #934 in Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Model: 15607
• Published on: 2009-01
• Released on: 2009-01-13
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: Xbox 360
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .58" h x 7.49" w x 5.69" l, .33 pounds

Features

• Battlefront-style action inside one of the greatest fantasy epics of all time
• Play in all your favorite battles and more, with all your favorite characters
• Choose your character class, and fight for good or for evil
• Play co-op or competitively, online with up to 16 players or locally with up to 4
• Features actual film content, such as the music score and Elrond himself

Amazon.com Product Description
Middle-Earth stands on the brink of destruction, and you must unite to either save it, or destroy it, in The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. With every race bound to this fate, all you have to decide is what to do with the time given to you, and choose your allegiance.

Join the battle for Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings: Conquest. View larger.

Fans of the books and movies will love roaming the game world. View larger.

All Your Favorites Come to Life
Developed by Pandemic Studios and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft's Xbox 360, The Lord of the Rings: Conquest allows gamers to make the choice between good and evil. Those who side with good will get to follow Frodo's journey through Middle-Earth, playing in battles inspired by both the books and the movies. Or join evil to find out what may have happened if Frodo had failed to destroy the One Ring, as you fight your way with Sauron back across the map in an attempt to destroy Rivendell, the Shire, and all that is good in the world.

You can play as a warrior, scout, mage or archer. View larger.

The online multiplayer mode allows for massive battles with up to 16 of your friends. View larger.

Building off the model Pandemic used with Star Wars: Battlefront, Lord of the Rings: Conquest provides you with a first and/or third person shooter style of game that not only lets you command strategy, but also lets you control the players in the center of the action. Participate in the Battle of Isengard as an Ent or fight Saruman at Orthanc as Gandalf himself. Take on the Nazgul as Aragorn while still protecting Frodo, or battle at Pelennor as a Rohirrim cavalry soldier. And that is just for the good guys!

In Conquest you will have to play many different characters in order to win. And it isn't always such a balanced match, as you will find yourself destroying towering siege engines and taking on hulking oliphaunts with your companions. You can choose to play all the heroes you love, or fight as a Nazgul tasked with killing Frodo and stretch your powerful wings as the Balrog himself in your battle for Moria.

Pick Your Own Style of Play
In the game, you'll be able to play as one of four different character classes. Choose the melee-based Warrior or Scout for up-close action, or pick the Archer or Mage to perform devastating ranged attacks. There is also talk of a 'special' class called the Guardian to give gamers a third choice. But don't worry about getting locked in, as you can actually change which character class you're playing on the fly, in the middle of the game's various objective-based missions.

Each class of characters has its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as unique special abilities. Playable units range from grunt soldiers, which are the weakest, to captains, which are the strongest AI units in the game other than the heroes. You also get to order in air strikes using either eagles or fellbeasts. Even better, players will be able to mount the occasional horse, unless they've chosen evil, in which case they will have to master the skill of riding a fearsome warg.

Multiple Modes for Endless Fun
As in Battlefront, Lord of the Rings: Conquest has enormous competitive multiplayer modes, including Conquest, Capture the Flag, and Hero Deathmatch. In addition to these classics, Conquest adds a Ring Bearer mode, in which one player tries to stay alive as Frodo against a host of ringwraiths, and Stronghold in which you fight on various maps in a Risk-style battle for territories. Fortunately, you won't be limited to roaming around with only your teammates, however, as battles occur in large scale with non-player combatants joining in the fray.

Conquest allows online play with up to 16 players for massive battles with all your friends, or in two-player cooperative mode. Players can also play locally with up to four players competitively, or two-player co-op on a split screen. When in the game itself, fans will get the thrill of hearing Howard Shore's score for the films accompanying the action, and both good and evil campaigns are narrated by Hugo Weaving, who played Elrond in the movies.

You can choose to play either good or evil, each with different endings.

Customer Reviews

Falls a little short of the hype...but still a GREAT game.
This review is based on having completed the "War of the Ring" campaign in single and multiplayer co-op and some limited time spent on multiplayer. I have not yet completed the "Rise of Sauron" campaign so cannot comment on it, though I suspect it will very much resemble the gameplay and mechanics of the first campaign.

Overall, I rate this game a 4. It is an action/strategy game in the vein of Star Wars: Battlefront. You take on the role of a warrior, archer, scout, or mage in some of the famous battles of LOTR history. If you play well enough, you may get the opportunity to play a "hero" character, which is essentially a buffed up counterpart to the "grunts" that you normally play and can turn the tide of battle. Playable heroes include Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli in the War of the Ring campaign. It has the film license and therefore uses scenes and voices from Peter Jackson's trilogy. However, it only loosely follows the story, as the focus in LOTR:C is on conquering certain areas or accomplishing objectives which may or may not jive with the original story.

It is a great improvement over the last gen contributions allowing for a little more strategy and replayability. The "alternate history" campaign is a clever addition that may irritate Tolkien purists but allows for a sense of anticipation and mystery to see how the designers have imagined a world overrun by the forces of Sauron.

Graphics = 3.5
Not top notch by any stretch, but when you consider (as other reviewers have mentioned) that the game has been designed to allow for 150 characters on-screen at once acting independently, they look pretty good. I was a little disappointed at the panoramic/overhead shots of the battlefields and fortresses leading into each mission. Although they capture the essence of the films, they seem blocky and not as detailed as I would have expected for a next-gen game. Character models look good, though I had difficulty in some missions identifying orcs/evil humans from further away. Movement and combat animations are nice but it is noticeable early on that characters of the same class always move in the same way (Grima Wormtongue is a buffed up scout, Aragorn is a buffed up warrior, etc.). In general, the battlefields are beautiful and relatively expansive, especially Pelennor Fields, and are literally full of activity, giving the impression of an epic battle happening around you.

Sound = 4
Don't spend much time appreciating sound but it seemed appropriate. The soundtrack is straight from the films which is nice. The voice of Elrond telling me the objective every 30 seconds was a little annoying at times, but actually did serve well when I got holed up the first time through the campaign and needed to redirect my efforts.

Gameplay = 4
This game is fun. Each class has its own set of strengths and weaknesses and seem to be balanced fairly well. A mage is deadly from a distance and can heal his comrades but won't last long if confronted by a warrior with a flaming sword. An archer has powerful arrows with area affects that are very useful, but become limited and quickly overwhelmed if enemies get too close. Warriors are sufficiently powered for up close combat and have several devastating moves that can eliminate multiple foes at once. They can also take more hits and are in general harder to stumble and kill. Scouts are a little more specialized. They have good melee skills and can string 8 moves together into a fairly effective combo but their real beauty is the ability to become invisible and "backstab", resulting in a one-hit kill. They are more fragile than warriors, however, and cannot take as many direct hits.

The game is essentially objective based. The player is presented with a wide open battlefield where enemies and allies will continue to respawn until objectives are completed. The player has a limited number of "lives" or respawns, before the game will register a defeat; these lives are gradually replenished as major objectives are completed. Exhausting all of your respawns is not the only way to lose a scenario, however. There are also times when a particular area needs to be "held" as a counter ticks down to the arrival of reinforcements or some other in-game event. The failure to hold this area and getting overrun will also end the scenario in defeat.

Winning a scenario involves completing objectives which may include conquests (capturing certain areas on the map), assassinations (eliminating a particularly nasty enemy hero), or sabotage (destroying enemy fortifications or siege engines). These objectives must be completed by the player, as the AI controlled allies will fight and support fairly well but do little else.

One bug that I noticed involved the siege of Isengard. At one point in the mission, you are given the opportunity to control Ents. It just so happened that my Ent was on the receiving end of a couple of flaming arrows and went down fairly quickly. I respawned as a warrior and noticed that all the Ents had been activated but only one or two were actively fighting in the battle zone. The others were either motionless or on the outskirts of the battle fighting with no apparent contribution to the objective, which was to capture a particular area. Without the Ent support, the area to capture was completely overrun. I tried through about five lives to clear the area sufficiently to capture and could never do so. This only happened once, however. Related to this, you will sometimes find that the AI will send a surge of support to the wrong area, leaving you solo to accomplish an objective. This led to my defeat more than once, but I found that the AI would behave differently when I started over and I would find repeat attempts easier to complete.

I spent little time in multiplayer but found it to be fun. It would be nice to have more than 8 vs. 8 to give the battles a more epic feel. No lag, and the battles seem fairly balanced when the characters involved are the standard picks. However, there are no ranking or matchmaking systems to speak of and I'm still at a loss as to how you can play as a hero character. I recall that my buddy and I entered a multiplayer match to find that we were only given the option to select the typical grunts but were fighting against heroes. Of course we lost badly and I couldn't figure out how the game would allow for this type of matchup. Maybe a question that another reviewer can answer.

Replay value = 3.5
The good and evil campaigns will give most gamers a total play time of 8-10 hours. I can't imagine wanting to replay the single player campaigns more than once or twice, but maybe to unlock achievements or conquer the game at a higher difficulty level. The multiplayer could definitely present additional replay value, but based on my experience there would need to be the addition of a matchmaking system and quality downloaded content to keep the game fresh and entertaining.

Bottom line: Rent it or try the demo on Live. You definitely won't regret that. If you're looking for a quality game in the LOTR franchise with some promising multiplayer potential, go ahead and pick it up. Just keep in mind that the campaigns alone are probably not worth the $60 price tag.

Good game but could use a little more meat.
I will give Evil Arts some credit. LotR is one of the very few movie licensed games that do rather well and just doesn't suck because it's a movie tie in. As far as LotR:C is concerned, it's a good winter game that came out after all the great titles came within the last 2 months.

Is it as memorable as the movie based games that came out on the last gen systems?

No.

And sadly to say, this almost has a twinge of too little too late.

Meaning that had this game had been released around the same time the movie titles had come out or around the same time when BF:1942 was popular this title would easily had been a 4 start title but now that these types of games have advanced so much in game mechanics, it's hard to play this game without feeling like you want more.

The game is pretty much a button masher with some elements of capture and defend a point.

You can change your character at will and use lots of combos.

And when you have done enough of the primary tasks, you get to use a hero like Aragorn, Gimily etc...you get the idea.

Graphically speaking the game looks pretty good, the character designs are done pretty well altho there can be some issues with the framerate when a whole lot going on onscreen. All of the backdrops are done wonderfully as if you are playing those scenes from the movies.

The control is pretty straightforward as I stated, this is a button masher so once you go thru the tutorial you should have the conrol downpat.

Soundwise, it's almost a dream...from Helm's Deep to the Pellenor Fields, with the sound of battle and Howard Shore's soundtrack, you almost feel as if you are there.

SO where does it all go wrong?

- "been there done that" feel...and some of this gets repetitive after a while and when you get the Hero Character, it's a buffed up version of your grunt.

- Still buggy - I had to reload the Helm's Deep stage because after I killed a certain group of creatures, the game didn't move to the next objective and after killing hordes of Uruks for 15 mins I realized that I had to start over because...

- Lack of clear directions - the game is not all that great at always telling you when you have completed objective A or where exactly at Point B you need to be and I think this may have been a bug or something Pandemic overlooked when putting this game together which also leads to

- Faulty multiplayer modes - getting into a game is easy but not all games are....I was playing mode where you had to move the Ring from one side of the battle area to the other. One thing I did not like and I am not sure if this was a bug or if this was intentional (since sometimes the ring wants to get lost) if a character dies while carrying the ring, you can't find on the map where it is.

- Another issue that may not be good for multiplayer is since a lot of games have hopped on to that bandwagon, there is no way (as far as I have seen) to level your character up as CoD has spoiled many gamers with being able to do this...without this mode, this game may leave some gamers wanting more.


Overall if you a fan of LotR, it's a no brainer game but playing this almost makes me wish that another RPG (and not an MMORPG) or something with more substance was released. Not that this game isn't any fun, but it may not capture mine or anyone's attention for too long besides completing it.


3 out of 5 stars.-

Conquest is conquered
I really don't see how anyone could give this game a very high score. First off, the single player is pretty cool, but really short. The game has very nice graphics and the combat mechanics are pretty good. The balance of the game is the worse. Certain characters are much stronger than others. For example, the scouts are very strong because they can become invisible and then you can kill people. If you really like button mashing, combo styled, battle games ; and you like LOTR..you will enjoy this game. However, it is still very short.

The biggest disappointment I have had is the multiplayer. It has decent options and what not, but the nature of LOTR battle combat results in everyone running to one large area and then hacking it out. Many times there will be 10 people in one giant ball of humans...hacking their way to glory. Also...almost everyone chooses scout and becomes invisible. You will have many deaths because of people stabbing you from behind. It results in the multiplayer having absolutely no strategy. The multiplayer is really lame.