Lord of the Rings: Conquest (Xbox 360) Preview
Posted by Chad Alan on 01.04.2009
Hands on: I wage war on Middle Earth, see how I felt it went.
I downloaded the demo to the new Lord of the Rings title this morning. Conquest is a new venture for LOTR, but not for developer Pandemic. Their previous outing in this field was the highly successful Star Wars: Battlefront series. Conquest follows the same formula of capture nodes in the midst of battle gameplay. From what I've seen so far, all they've done is improve on an already well-done formula.
Available on the demo is a single player tutorial and 2 multiplayer maps played over Xbox Live. I started off with the tutorial. The scene opens up in the midst of the first battle from the first movie. This being the final battle from the War of the Ring storyline. A great addition to this game is the war raging in the background. You really get a sense that you are fighting for a cause against an army and not just some isolated battle of two small teams against each other. The fact that the developers realized that most people have played games like this before and the only basic of things showed to you is how to move, is refreshing for a seasoned gamer like me. The scenario is simple, go here, learn some controls, kill some mobs, lather, rinse, repeat. The attacks are broken into light, medium, and heavy with each one having a special attack when used with the special attack button. You also get a feel for each of the classes and their uses. First, you start as a human warrior, then switch to an archer. After that, you learn about the scout, the mage, then finally the hero; in this case Isildur. The mage is probably the most versatile as it is the only one that can heal other units as well as himself. The scout has a nice little sneak attack that can be performed while cloaked. Finally, as Isildur you are charged with the task of defeating Sauron.
Having learned how to play the game and to use the classes to their potential, it's time to take on the world in multiplayer. Standard multiplayer options apply here; ranked or unranked and quick or custom match. Not available in the demo are the options for splitscreen, local, or private matches. Now connected it's time to select whether you want to be good or evil. Seeing as one of the maps is the Shire, it's awfully hard not to be evil and bring about ruin to those filthy little hobbits of Hobbiton. After choosing sides you can choose which class to be. From there it's you're standard node capture warfare game. As you take over certain spots new options become available to you such as mounts and new units to select. In my online experience I only saw horses and Gandalf available for the humans. The orcs recieved wargs, the ability to switch to an ogre, and the even more powerful and menacing Balrog. The favored class seemed to be the scout since you can cloak yourself for a limited time and sneak up behind someone and one-shot kill them. Perhaps some kind of abilities reward system like in Call of Duty 4 could be implemented to reveal hidden units or some such thing to balance the effect of scouts. Everything else seems to have a good balance. The ogres deal a massive amount of damage but are slow and if a unit can get behind one he can enter a single button press mini-game to take half of their HP outs. For all the menace of the Balrog, he is weak to magic. The only real fault I can find with the game in this demo version is the lack of a lock-on target system. I found myself running in for a kill and all of a sudden I'm swinging my sword next to my opponent instead of dead on like I had when I was running up to him. I could only see that being useful in melee combat, since each class has some sort of distance attack this would make things a little too easy to hit someone with a throwing axe.
The graphics in this game do justice to the award winning movies. Scenes from the movie are used for cut scenes and the transtion is hard to notice. The sound immerses you in the throws of battle. I didn't even have my surround sound turned on and I felt like I was in the middle of everything. The maps are well laid out. There are usually a few ways to get to a point on a map so you're not getting bottle necked into one spot and open to attack. Even online the game plays out smoothly on my DSL connection. The graphics stayed as sharp as playing offline and I didn't notice any hiccups in the gameplay. I would definately reccomend this game to people that loved the play style of Battlefront, if not, then you'd really need to be a LOTR geek like I am to get past the single objective play. One ring to rule them all...this day, I rule.
