By Vikram Dussa
The Lord of the Rings, the epic novel by J R R Tolkien, must have been read by every literature-loving, English-speaking person in the world, The movie trilogy, which has broken many Hollywood box office records, must have been watched by every movie buff out there. Even the previous games based on this story line were fairly successful. With this in the background, one can’t help but have high expectations on this latest game by Pandemic Studios, The Lord of the Rings: Conquest.
The single player mode has two campaigns and an instant action mode. The War of the Ring campaign, where you play the forces of good, follows the events in the LOTR trilogy, which once finished, unlocks the Rise of Sauron campaign, which creates a scenario assuming Frodo fails to destroy the ring and narrates the consequent events that lead to the dark lord’s rise to power. This campaign lets you take control of Sauron’s forces. Both the campaigns are equally short and mediocre. The instant action mode lets you play Capture the One Ring, Conquest and Team Deathmatch with 15 AI bots.
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Each campaign is divided into chapters. You need to complete certain objectives to complete the chapter. You start each chapter playing as one of four classes – The Warrior is the standard hack and slash character, The Archer uses bow and arrows in combat, The Mage uses magic and can heal his allies, and The Scout can use stealth and move around and stab enemies in the back undetected. The objectives may be anything from capture a base to defend the base for a certain amount of time, kill a certain number of enemies to kill the boss. Almost every chapter has the same set of objectives, just in a different order, set in different maps, making the game very repetitive. The game allows for switching of characters in between objectives at spawn points. You also get to play as a hero at critical points in the game.
The game play is bland and unimaginative. There is a lack of variety in the combat moves, which restricts the game play to just plain button mashing. There is no gore or finishing moves. There is no satisfaction derived from killing an enemy troll or even an oliphaunt or an enemy boss. To add to that, there are glitches in this game, which may make the enemy boss commit suicide by falling off a cliff without even fighting you, make horses stand and freeze on their two front legs, or make your character get stuck in a fence or wall.
The graphics in the game are just as uninspiring. The character animations and character models are, to put it simply, crappy. The environment textures are smudgy and bland and you cannot help but compare them to the awesome visuals in the movie trilogy and rant about it. The entire sound track has been ripped from the movie trilogy and is the one positive in the game. Through out the campaign, you will have a voice in the background repeatedly telling what you need to do. It becomes quite irritating and only gets worse in the Rise of Sauron campaign, where you’re called all sorts of names; filthy maggot, fool, idiot, and filthy rat to name a few.
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And then there is the multiplayer, which has three modes of gameplay. The Capture the One Ring mode, which is like capture the flag, the Team Deathmatch mode and the Conquest mode, which is like Capture the Control Point. The multiplayer is plagued by the same defects as the single player campaigns and the character classes are very imbalanced, with the Mage more powerful then any other class.
Conclusion
I am a huge fan of action games and I’ve played and enjoyed even mediocre games in this genre like Viking and Too Human. I am also a big fan of J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth and must have watched the movie trilogy at least a dozen times. So when I got this game in my hands, I did expect a lot from it, but sadly it disappoints on every front. This game had so much potential and could have been much better had there been a genuine effort from the developers.
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