How could a game that lets you take control of an Ent and knock down swaths of hapless Uruk-hai with your massive branch-arms end up being so unimpressive?
Lord of the Rings: Conquest, an action game built around the legendary battles of Middle-earth depicted in J.R.R Tolkien's books, should have worked well. In Tolkien's stories, warriors with unique abilities combine their talents to win massive battles; Conquest developer Pandemic made a name for itself with the Star Wars Battlefront series, action games that featured squads of different character classes that combined their abilities to win massive battles. The perfect marriage!
But the honeymoon ends quickly. Conquest's 16-player online battles can be fun, but they get repetitive in short order. And the single-player mode, in which you can re-enact the big scenes from the movies and then play an alternate story in which the forces of Sauron win the day, is a mess.
(Lord of the Rings: Conquest is available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. We reviewed the PlayStation 3 version.)
If you do buy Conquest, you'll probably want to start with the single-player campaign. It's brief – it won't take you more than a few hours to blast through all 15 levels, although you can go in later at a higher difficulty level. Playing the solo mode is a good way to get acquainted with the game's four character classes.
Don't expect to spend too much time playing as your favorite heroes. While you will occasionally get to step into the shoes of Frodo or Aragorn, most of your time will be spent taking control of a nameless warrior, scout, mage or archer. Each of the four has different abilities: The warrior can hit things with his sword. The scout can turn invisible and back-stab enemies, killing them instantly. The mage can cast lightning spells and heal himself and allies. The archer can (spoiler!) shoot arrows.
The single-player campaign is a series of discrete levels, each based on a famous battle from the films, such as Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith. You don't build your characters' powers from mission to mission; each objective is an entirely self-contained chunk of gameplay. Each level is a series of varying objectives – you might be tasked with killing a certain number of enemies, then capturing a section of the battlefield by keeping enemies off it for a few minutes, then assassinating a commander.
Some classes will be better suited for certain battles. In fact, I found that if you don't pick the right class, you're often dead meat. Conquest helps you choose in the not-very-subtle manner of leaving the character you should pick at the front of the class-selection screen.
It all sounds great, and yet Conquest is thoroughly unpolished at best and mundane at worst. It is an excellent example of what happens when a single-player campaign is ungracefully shoved into a game designed around multiplayer action. It's never any fun to look at – there are no interesting cinematic scenes, no pretty level designs, no camera angles except the one going straight into the back of Gimli's head. In a word, it is sloppy.
And occasionally it's just bad. Like when you're getting cheap-shotted by an infinite squadron of mages while you're trying to operate an unwieldy ballista installation. Or when a giant bird picks you up and throws you away for an unavoidable instant death. Or you get to play as a legendary hero character and realize that they suck just as much as the army of grunts you were just controlling.
It's slightly more fun when the movie campaign ends and you're thrust into the Rise of Sauron. This kicks off with you, playing the Witch-King, sucker-punching Frodo Baggins from behind just as he is about to throw the Ring into Mount Doom. You then get to play as the forces of evil, wiping out all of humanity. This culminates with getting to massacre a hundred or so Hobbits while burning the Shire to the ground.
I admit it: After being annoyed for a few hours at how weak the forces of good were, getting to slaughter every last one of them was a welcome catharsis. But this didn't make Conquest a good game, just a funnier one. It remains packed with disappointing moments, like playing as the Balrog and, realizing that you can't see a damn thing because his fiery personage takes up the entire screen, simply mashing buttons until he dies. Or playing as Sauron and dying because you walk into a foot-deep river.
You can play through the campaign with a friend, either in the same room or online. This is more fun, but only because it's amusing to subject a friend to the same ridiculousness. How we laughed when we saw Legolas stuck to the ceiling by his head somehow, firing a volley of arrows at nothing. (To be fair, this may have been some heretofore unknown sort of elf magic.)
In short, buying Conquest for its single-player mode would be foolish. But what of multiplayer? If you've ever played any online multiplayer game, you know what to expect here. There are three modes: the kill-everything Deathmatch, the seize-points-on-the-field Control and Capture-the-Flag (or the Ring, in this case) and a hilarious Hero Deathmatch mode where everyone gets to play as one of the series' mainstays, which basically means a whole mess of Gandalfs running around.
Multiplayer got more fun as more people joined the game, because it became possible to band together and use players' varying talents to isolate and kill the other team's members. This was complicated by the fact that, as of this writing, only six people were playing the PlayStation 3 version on Electronic Arts' public servers. (You can host your own games for your friends or for anyone, but the EA servers are where you go to jump in instantly.)
As players continue to explore the abilities of the character classes, multiplayer games might become much more interesting as strategies start to form. For now, it's just a bunch of killing. I don't see any reason to choose any class other than the Mage. He can heal himself and his allies. He has a lightning attack that actually homes in on enemies to a limited degree and has incredible range. He's got two other very powerful attack spells. Why bother with anyone else?
Yes, there are probably advantages to the other characters once you find out how to use them, but if so, they were not apparent to me, even after playing through the single-player mode.
Even though it's the focus of the game, Conquest's multiplayer mode doesn't really do it for me. Some of the matches can take way too long – the deathmatch setups on the EA servers only end after 50 kills, and everything was starting to feel repetitive by about 25. You can play as Ents and Trolls in multiplayer, but much like in the single-player mode, stomping around as a huge creature is an unwieldy, sloppy experience that doesn't even begin to offer the pleasures that taking control of such awesome creatures should.
In attempting to create a sprawling action game that lets you play swordsmen and archers and wizards and scouts and trolls and Ents and Sauron, the developers failed to make any of those experiences much fun. Conquest might be worth killing a weekend with, and will probably find its niche with Battlefront fans, but it is lackluster at every turn.
Image courtesy Electronic Arts
WIRED Concept fits the franchise well, slaughtering Hobbits is fun.
TIRED Sloppy gameplay, unimpressive graphics, boring presentation, by-the-numbers design.
$60, Electronic Arts
Rating: 
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