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The Lord of the Rings: Conquest puts players into the thick of the tremendous battle over The One Ring, playing out battles from both sides of the confrontation! Conquest will let players take control of many of the characters and creatures from the series and pit them on any of the franchise’s famous battlefields. From Cave-trolls to Oliphaunts to the Balrog and even Sauron, practically the entire universe will be available for battle with up to 150 characters on-screen at any one time. Up to 16 players will be able to clash online, with four players able to play cooperatively through the main campaign either online or via four-player split-screen. And with two distinct campaigns to play through, including an original take on what would happen if Sauron regained control of the One Ring, the game promises plenty of scenarios to wage battle through.

Genre: Online Action

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: Pandemic Studios

Online Play: 16 Versus/ 4 Co-op

Local Play: 4 Co-op

February 17, 2010 –
EA continues to shut down online servers to many of its older titles. Highlighting the soon-to-be departed are Lord of the Rings: Conquest, Godfather and Def Jam. Player have until March 16 to get their fix before having to wave goodbye.

Def Jam for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

Godfather for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

Lord of the Rings: Conquest for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames for PC

Need for Speed: Carbon for PlayStation Portable

Need for Speed: ProStreet for PlayStation Portable

Simpsons for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

Last month, Electronic Arts announced it would be shutting down severs to many of its older sports titles, including Madden 08, NASCAR 09, and Fantasy Football 09.

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.

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