The Lord of the Rings: Conquest Review

Conquest is a multiplayer action-strategy game developed by pandemic studios and published by EA Games. It focuses on capturing control points and killing enemies.
Conquest is basically a sequel to Battlefront II, which was released at the end of 2005 for the last generation of consoles. It was also developed by Pandemic. The gameplay is very similar to the battlefront series in the way that the player spawns as an infantry soldier and tries to capture a number of set command post by standing near them without enemies present. The amount of Command points they have contributed to a score. When the score is high enough, they win. However, several major tweaks to the formula make this a leap forward for the "series."
The first major change is noticed even before you step onto the battlefield. The classes have been redone for a medieval setting, and the types have also been changed. While Battlefront had 7 classes, they were all useless except for the basic soldier. Conquest only features 4 units, but they are shockingly well balanced. The warriors are strongest at close range, but are easily sniped by archers. Mages are weak alone, but can heal allies and create a large shield that block enemy fire. Their magic attacks can kill large groups of enemies at once. Scouts have no ranged attacks and low health, but are the fastest runners and have the best attack damage. They can also turn invisible and instant kill enemies from behind. A variety of horses, trolls, and mumukil are controllable, and air units can kill you in the campaign.
Once you step onto the battlefield, the focus turns to the gameplay. The games ranged combat system works well, seeming like a basic third person shooter. However, the lack of any form of cover mechanic (Be it crouching or cover-hugging) prevents the shooting from rivalling anything else currently on the market. Warriors, meanwhile, have a more complex combat system. They have light, medium, and heavy attacks, three special energy attacks, and a block. The combo system was well employed, but was easily mastered, and made the player invincible against the AI.
Another complaint was the strategy label. While instant action had some strategy with finding out which enemy command post were not defended, most of the game was pure action. The campaign just involved swarming of the enemy to reach an objective, then capturing/killing/defending/retrieving it. It could become very repetitive .
Also, the game does not look to good. While it had definitely next-gen graphics, the Xbox 360 has done so much better. Certain objects pixlate very quickly (Particularly the trees-what is it with pixlating trees? The leaves turn into pixles twice the size of your head!), and the whole thing lacks the crispness of most modern games. The game also had a proliferation of glitches (there is a large proliferation of the dead-dude-hangs-randomly-in-air glitch) The game is generally visually unimpressive.
The games local multiplayer is decent, with all modes available. However, campaign is only two player- what's with that! For a game that is built for online multiplayer, the online multiplayer has serious issues. The connection is universally bad, and the frame rate plunges online. It`s like playing in bullet time. Also, you cannot start a public game. You have to join EA`s setlist, which has each map on a certain mode. You get so sick of Mount Doom hero team Deathmatch.
However, the game makes up for all this with a healthy dose of pure fun. The multitude of maps and game modes give the game plenty of replay value, though some courses (Helms Deep, Pellinor Fields, Rivendell) are better than others. (Minas Morgul, Mount Doom) The repetition of gameplay can be ignored with gameplay this fun.
8.5/10 Great fun for LOTR and Battlefront fans, good action for not too picky gamers.