Star Wars Battlefront: The Lord of the Ring edition is here!
That basically sums up LOTR: Conquest. It feels like a Battlefront game with LOTR skinned characters and abilities. Conquest heavily revolves around getting territories in order to win. Whether you’re playing the game’s good or evil campaign, the objective usually falls under get the territory or protect it. While you are playing you’ll always fall under one of the game’s four classes; warrior, archer, mage, and scout. Each of the classes has their own set of skills. The warrior mainly uses his sword and is best at close range combat. The archer is the best at long distance combat by using his bow and different types of arrows. The mage is fairly good at any distance of combat and is the only character that doesn’t rely on health orbs to heal. Finally the scout is the stealth class, he turns invisible and can stab an opponent in the back; killing them with the one blow.
Knowing when to pick each class and how to use them does take some slight strategy. Following with in these four classes are the game’s heroes. They are recognizable characters from the movies such as Gandalf and Aragorn. The evil side also has their own heroes such as Saruman. When it comes to the good and evil side everything is mirrored; good has their mighty mage and so does evil, good players can take control of Ents, while evil players can control trolls, this applies to both campaigns and multiplayer. If it weren’t for these recognizable characters and species it might be hard to distinguish this as a LOTR game. Majority of the time it feels like a generic fantasy game. Other than seeing the game’s heroes this really could be a hack and slash version of World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, or some other fantasy universe. It feels like the license is mainly there to sell games.
Whether you’re playing as one of the game’s grunt soldiers or a famous hero the combat feels clunky. While the gameplay depends on which class you chose; it never really feels fluid or very interactive. It’s not really the controls, though not great, they get the job done. Much of the game play’s problem might actually fall on the game’s animation; everything looks stiff and almost robotic. Of course if it doesn’t look right, it probably doesn’t feel right either. Also annoying things like certain attacks make you fall down and it might take around 5 or 6 seconds to get up, all while you’re taking damage and may possibly die. Visually the game’s animation system isn’t the only problem; from its texture quality to character models this look as if it’s an Xbox 360 launch title.
The game’s campaign is more or less practice for the multiplayer, since you’re basically doing the same things in the single player, just with bots and video from the movies to go in between levels as the game’s “story”. Playing the evil campaign is rewriting LOTR’s story; so it is interesting to see its turn of events. The 16 player multiplayer is somewhat entertaining; the variety of maps and game types are sufficient, but more would be better. In most of the game types you’re one of the grunt soldiers, but at a certain point in the match the top player on the winning team gets to transform into a hero; the exception being in Hero Team Deathmatch, where every player is always a hero. The multiplayer is really the meat of the game, since it can sometimes be one of the few online console games that actually require teamwork and strategy to win.
During these somewhat slow months of game releases we can’t exactly be picky, so it this might be a nice rental for some gamers. If you’re a gamer outside of extreme hack and slash or fantasy game fans, you probably won’t find this game very exhilarating or worth it’s $60 price tag.
6.4/10
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