About a week an a half ago, I traded some more of my extensive game collection to the Exchange in the hopes of procuring another multiplayer game to help pass the time since beating Borderlands. I managed to scrape together enough funds to purchase an old copy of Lord of the Rings: Conquest, a game developed by Star Wars: Battlefront creator Pandemic and distributed by evil empire Electronic Arts (or EA, because most of their target demographics can't spell "electronic"). This wasn't the first EA game that I'd ever purchased and it certainly won't be the last, but having a company so historically responsible for selling some of the most mediocre games on the planet allows me to assign a good portion of this game's failures on them.
After all, Pandemic produced Star Wars: Battlefront and its sequel, two games which I thought were excellently designed for their time, though they are admittedly just licensed ripoffs of EA's own Battlefield series of games. I, like most fans of the series, eagerly awaited the arrival of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 only to be disheartened when it was announced by LucasArts that Pandemic wouldn't be making it, right before the game went into development purgatory, never to be heard from again. So when I heard that Pandemic was producing a Wingnut Films Lord of the Rings game for EA, I naturally assumed that it would be a pumped-up Battlefront game with a fantasy setting. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 seemed like a solid enough game (with full game modes for up to and including four players on the old Xbox - quite a technical feat), so I was earnestly awaiting this game to see what Pandemic could do with the better hardware.
Apparently, not much.
GRAPHICS: I honestly wasn't expecting very much from this game, and yet it still managed to disappoint me. The characters, though textured nicely, are relatively low-polygon, as are nearly all of the environments. I don't know why, but it reminds me of a Midway developed game from yore, such as Gauntlet Legends. I mean, I can forgive it somewhat because in order to keep four players per console for all modes it wasn't going to look like Call of Duty or Gears of War, but this honestly doesn't look much (if at all) better than the last game like this that Pandemic released, and that was Star Wars: Battlefront 2. The thing that really brings it down in terms of appeal is the spastic camera. Like Battlefront it will change to show you who killed you, but often times I find that it will put the camera into a wall, not giving me any view of the action. There is also a dearth of instances where my character will fall over dead with no indication of what killed me. Single-plane textured polygons also make themselves known, and everything in the game just has a "last generation" feel. You would think that a solid frame-rate would alleviate the problem, but the frame rate isn't so high that you don't notice the game chugging at inopportune times. It's just plain ugly.
SOUND: While the sound is for the most part tolerable, and fans of the films will appreciate the screeching Nazguls, the bellowing trolls, and the trumpeting elephants, they will also be severely annoyed by the voice-overs. I realize that they did not have access to the original cast when making the game (except for Hugo Weaving), but Gandalf sounds far more like Ed Asner than Ian McKellan, and the forced fake British accents used by some of the main speaking characters just feels obnoxiously mocking to me.
CONTROL: Star Wars: Battlefront 2 allowed the player to change every single setting on the controller, allowing fans of different games or genres the chance to customize their playtime to their liking. Lord of the Rings: Conquest does not. As a matter of fact, the only changes available to the player are the analog sensitivity and inverting the camera. This would be fine if the controls in Conquest made any attempt at feeling natural to fans of third person shooters, but it does not. Instead it opts for a button-mashing brawler style of control, which works in theory, but because all of the primary attacks are mapped to the face buttons and not the triggers I found myself falling victim to enemies that managed to sneak up behind me because my fingers couldn't operate the buttons and the camera stick at the same time. Additionally, because the auto-lock for the various classes is so bad, I found myself swinging at air in an unbreakable combo, allowing the opportunistic AI to sneak up behind me. If there had been some kind of combo-breaker move, this might not have been so bad, but there isn't so it was.
GAMEPLAY: The core gameplay of the Battlefront series remains intact. Players must fight back the enemy army to gain control of various spawn points on the map. Capturing all of the spawn points for a preset amount of time will automatically win the match, as will killing all of the enemy soldiers. At least I think it is. To be fair, I've been struggling through the story mode which differs slightly, in that the missions are more structured. There are several classes of soldiers to choose from (like in Battlefront) from warriors, to archers, scouts (who can sneak up and stab other players in the back), and mages. there are also "hero" characters that can be unlocked during the matches (depending on the stage) that are more powerful than the regulars, and usually have some additional abilities. There's nothing significantly different gameplay-wise than the old Battlefront games, except for a focus on more melee-based attacks.
What really wrecks the game's story mode, though is the extra life system. In Battlefield and Battlefront you have "tickets," a number of reserve soldiers that deplete as you and your allies die. When you run out of tickets, the stage is lost. Conquest uses a more video game standard "extra life" system, whereby players are given a few and then earn more as they defeat objectives. While this certainly makes the game more challenging, the reasons for the challenge are not ones that one would expect; most often the lives are depleted by "cheap" deaths such as falling off a cliff after the automated character animation has you jumping off of a troll, or getting stuck on a tear in the stage's geometry when the enemy is firing catapults at you. Also, the computer allies' artificial intelligence is far inferior to the enemies' -- orc warriors will block your attacks repeatedly, but your troops will just stand there facing its nice, open back while you fail to deal damage to it. It sort of reminds me of the Dynasty Warriors series of games in that respect. Enemy troops, on the other hand, will swarm you and take every opportunity to put a sword in your unguarded back. Effectively putting the nail in the coffin for single-player enjoyment is the fact that AI bosses tend to follow you around the map ignoring all other soldiers in their way, no matter what class you're playing (as the balrog can kill with one hit, you need quite a bit of distance to take him down with a mage or archer, for example).
STORY: What kind of Lord of the Rings fanboy would I be if I didn't point out that because you're playing a game based on a movie that's based on a book, it's about as far from the source material that you could imagine. What's more, the game takes several annoying liberties with the core Tolkien canon. If you thought that the death of Sarumon in the Peter Jackson extended version of the film was irritating, just wait until you witness Gandalf storm Orthanc and pummel Sarumon to death. Or perhaps it'll be when the balrog "comes back to life" and you have to defeat it again -- not for the first time, as in Fellowship, but in the time-line of the game it actually comes back to life for no discernible reason. It doesn't really matter what your poison is, a piece of you will die in these moments. Another annoyance is the movie footage interposed between the stages in story mode. I can assume that anyone with that much interest in playing the game has seen the movie, or vice versa, so it just seems like it's there to eat up the players time and no other reason.
OVERALL: Ah, now to blame EA. This game's many faults may at first seem to fall to Pandemic, but in light of my delight with Battlefront, I can't see how they could have dropped the ball so badly this time around, other than perhaps a very pushy EA forcing them to release it before it was ready, as only EA can, knowing (as they do) how drooling fans will buy anything that has their favorite franchise stamped on it. If you feel that you must play it, only do so with friends to soften the blow.
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