Review: The Lord of the Rings: Conquest

[John Funk]

Review: The Lord of the Rings: Conquest

This attempt at bringing Star Wars: Battlefront to the lands of Middle-Earth might be better off consigned to the fires of Mt. Doom.

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[bue519]

Yeah, I agree totally with the review after playing the demo. Its just too samey to be a good game. Even battlefront at least had an extra special class for each side.
EDIT: Just do yourself a favor and play Age of Chivalry. Its a much more fun medieval multiplayer (fps?) game.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

I note one thing watching the review suppliment... The game just "doesn't look right" (tm) there's just something about medieval Archers and Armored warriors with swords circle straffing that strikes me as, not only wrong, but distinctly offputting.

Also... did Susan lose a bet or something? Or are the rest of you guys just Video Shy? She seems to do the voice overs for all of the reviews that aren't Russ's.

 

[Sennz0r]

The human announcer annoyed the piss out of me.

The game also feels wrong, I don't know.
Good review, though.

 

[black lincon]

Has it become fassionable to rip on conquest? you spend more than half your review complaining about the campain, which wasn't awful in my opinion, it wasn't the best but to focus on that is just unfair. You don't even make passing mentions of special abilities of anyone but the mage and scout, and you miss ones of theirs as well, the mage has a force push like ability and the scout has several melee skills. You also seem to ignore the ranged weapons each class has and dont make mentions of all the fighting choices, just that fighteng is cluttered, which it usually isn't. I also like how you make no mention of the trolls/ents, they were included into the game and they do have different skills, as in the ent is damaged over time by fire and how the troll has a longer range and is just better.

I'm sick of every game reviewer and their mother attacking conquest, yes the campain wasn't up to snuff but it wasn't so bad that it deserved to eclipse every good aspect of the game.

 

[Jursa]

I shall not ruin my view of the LoTR with crappy games...

 

[Blazsy]

I have the game , i'm happy about it, just a fun game while relaxing...

 

[VoidObject]

Nah fish food, I thought it had potential. If they would have included more classes, or even better character creation. Maybe throw in a skill set to choose from? You could buy items. You could even divert from the main questline and do side quests where you have to go kill things to farm items and bring back to NPC's. That would be great!

Oh wait... that sounds like something familiar.

 

[Archaon6044]

i played the XBL demo, and i can only accuratly describe it as FAIL. it's a good idea. battlefront was awesome. LoTR is also awesome, so the 2 should mix, right?

Wrong.
and shut up

 

[black lincon]

Am I the only person who quite likes it? Sure, it's not as good as SW : Battlefront, but it's decent enough, and I enjoy playing it.

Thank you. It seems like the game reviewing industry has it out for this game and I can't understand why. It way not have had the perfect story but it was a situation similar to Halo, the story may have sucked but the multiplayer made up for it.

Oh and if anyone claims that scouts are cheap I will point at multi-arrow and tell you to shut the hell up.

EDIT:

i played the XBL demo, and i can only accuratly describe it as FAIL. it's a good idea. battlefront was awesome. LoTR is also awesome, so the 2 should mix, right?

Wrong.
and shut up

What are you taking the Yahtzee approach to game reviewing? Give me one way the demo was bad. all the demo had was the tutorial and the mulitplayer. You can't complain much about the tutorial , how many games have tutorials that are amazing? And the multiplayer was the best part of the game, I havn't read a review who has said otherwise, most just complain because they wanted the story to be more epic because they really love Tolkien.

 

[Yog Sothoth]

probably the reason that all the reviews for Conquest are negative is because.... get ready for it:

it's a lousy game!

i loved Battlefront as much as everyone else, maybe even a little more, and i was really looking forward to this game... but after seeing how crappy it was from playing the demo, i realized that i should stay far away from the full product at all costs...

just for fun, here is a list of a few of the problems i noticed with the demo:

1: the graphics are lackluster at best... it almost looks like a last-gen game.
2: not nearly enough units on the field at once... the battles simply don't feel very epic.
3: collision detection was rather wonky.
4: melee combos aren't synced-up well with button presses.
5: ridable mounts are a joke.
6: classes are unbalanced.

hopefully SW: Battlefront III will get picked up by a new developer and actually be a good game, cause i need my fix, and Conquest failed to deliver...

 

[black lincon]

The game was small, unpolished, and lazy. More over, it wasn't really that much fun. The review industry was right.

Okay so when exactly did you get a chance to play the full game to a point where you were capable of analyzing all aspects of it? The guy only skips over a few part but all are worth mentioning. he mentions skills but leaves out the fact that more than just the mages has them, he mentions you can control other things but leaves out trolls, ents, oliphants, and catapults, he mentions that the archer has a ranged attack but leaves out that every one else does too. I don't think those are tiny details that got left out due to space constraints, they are combat mechanics for two of them and the trolls, ents, etc are my answer to his complaint about not having a wide variety of "vehicles." He also just passes of heroes as stronger versions of the classes. This is only true to a point, yes their basic skills are based off the basic classes and they do more damage and can take more hits but most of them have skills completely unique to them. Yes Isildor's skills are almost exactly the same as a warrior, but you can't say the same about Aragorn or a Ring Wraith.

This happen with almost every movie game based off a really good movie. You can't judge the game by it's own merits but instead demand that it be an exact recreation of the movie. Yes the story wasn't the best, and they added things that never happened in the movie or the book, but that wasn't the entire game it would be like reviewing Gears or Halo without taking into account that it is best played with other people.

 

[Nerdfury]

Has it become fassionable to rip on conquest? you spend more than half your review complaining about the campain, which wasn't awful in my opinion, it wasn't the best but to focus on that is just unfair. You don't even make passing mentions of special abilities of anyone but the mage and scout, and you miss ones of theirs as well, the mage has a force push like ability and the scout has several melee skills. You also seem to ignore the ranged weapons each class has and dont make mentions of all the fighting choices, just that fighteng is cluttered, which it usually isn't. I also like how you make no mention of the trolls/ents, they were included into the game and they do have different skills, as in the ent is damaged over time by fire and how the troll has a longer range and is just better.

I'm sick of every game reviewer and their mother attacking conquest, yes the campain wasn't up to snuff but it wasn't so bad that it deserved to eclipse every good aspect of the game.

Have you considered that people are giving poor reviews because it's a poor game? You know what? When you can spell correctly, and when you provide your own reviews of quality come back and speak to us again.

 

[John Funk]

The game was small, unpolished, and lazy. More over, it wasn't really that much fun. The review industry was right.

Okay so when exactly did you get a chance to play the full game to a point where you were capable of analyzing all aspects of it? The guy only skips over a few part but all are worth mentioning. he mentions skills but leaves out the fact that more than just the mages has them, he mentions you can control other things but leaves out trolls, ents, oliphants, and catapults, he mentions that the archer has a ranged attack but leaves out that every one else does too. I don't think those are tiny details that got left out due to space constraints, they are combat mechanics for two of them and the trolls, ents, etc are my answer to his complaint about not having a wide variety of "vehicles." He also just passes of heroes as stronger versions of the classes. This is only true to a point, yes their basic skills are based off the basic classes and they do more damage and can take more hits but most of them have skills completely unique to them. Yes Isildor's skills are almost exactly the same as a warrior, but you can't say the same about Aragorn or a Ring Wraith.

This happen with almost every movie game based off a really good movie. You can't judge the game by it's own merits but instead demand that it be an exact recreation of the movie. Yes the story wasn't the best, and they added things that never happened in the movie or the book, but that wasn't the entire game it would be like reviewing Gears or Halo without taking into account that it is best played with other people.

This is a review, not an instruction manual. If I were to talk about every single ability that everyone had in every game, I'd never get to talking about whether or not it's a *good game* or not.

The fact that other classes have special abilities (or that they have ranged attacks) is irrelevant. Nearly all of the class abilities are just... attacks. They do more damage. Maybe they do homing damage (Warrior's Light Special), maybe they do AoE damage (Scout's Heavy Special) or whatever, but they just do damage. It doesn't change the fact that all the Warrior is doing is smashing people with a sword, or all the Archer is doing is shooting people with a bow. They're just slightly different bow-shots or sword-smashes.

Meanwhile, the Mage's bubble and Fire Wall actually function other than just straight-up damage so that they're actually interesting and varied to play.

Playing as the Ents and Trolls (and Balrog) was fun at first, but they just felt clunky to control. the Balrog was a pain because it was so BIG that it obscured the camera, and they - like the others - were limited to the ground. In Battlefront, vehicles gave the game another dimension to control by necessitating control of the sky.

Judging the game on its own merits is easy. Because it's a lousy, phoned-in, half-assed game with barely-better-than-last-generation graphics, unintuitive controls (especially while controlling one of the "vehicles,") and an announcer that just won't shut up.

 

[Yog Sothoth]

...

Judging the game on its own merits is easy. Because it's a lousy, phoned-in, half-assed game with barely-better-than-last-generation graphics, unintuitive controls (especially while controlling one of the "vehicles,") and an announcer that just won't shut up.

couldn't have said it better myself....

to those of you who are enjoying this game, go ahead and continue to do so... no negative reviews should take away from your fun if you really do like it... but trying to defend it to the rest of us is just an exercise in futility...

some people are willing to look past a game's shortcomings if they really like the IP - i for one loved the Ghost in the Shell games on the PS1 and PS2, but i didn't try to convince anyone else that they were good games because i knew that my enjoyment of them was rooted in my fanaticism of the franchise... when judged with the same measuring stick that all games are judged by, they were crappy games that only appealed to the fanboys like myself...

 

[black lincon]

The game was small, unpolished, and lazy. More over, it wasn't really that much fun. The review industry was right.

Okay so when exactly did you get a chance to play the full game to a point where you were capable of analyzing all aspects of it? The guy only skips over a few part but all are worth mentioning. he mentions skills but leaves out the fact that more than just the mages has them, he mentions you can control other things but leaves out trolls, ents, oliphants, and catapults, he mentions that the archer has a ranged attack but leaves out that every one else does too. I don't think those are tiny details that got left out due to space constraints, they are combat mechanics for two of them and the trolls, ents, etc are my answer to his complaint about not having a wide variety of "vehicles." He also just passes of heroes as stronger versions of the classes. This is only true to a point, yes their basic skills are based off the basic classes and they do more damage and can take more hits but most of them have skills completely unique to them. Yes Isildor's skills are almost exactly the same as a warrior, but you can't say the same about Aragorn or a Ring Wraith.

This happen with almost every movie game based off a really good movie. You can't judge the game by it's own merits but instead demand that it be an exact recreation of the movie. Yes the story wasn't the best, and they added things that never happened in the movie or the book, but that wasn't the entire game it would be like reviewing Gears or Halo without taking into account that it is best played with other people.

This is a review, not an instruction manual. If I were to talk about every single ability that everyone had in every game, I'd never get to talking about whether or not it's a *good game* or not.

The fact that other classes have special abilities (or that they have ranged attacks) is irrelevant. Nearly all of the class abilities are just... attacks. They do more damage. Maybe they do homing damage (Warrior's Light Special), maybe they do AoE damage (Scout's Heavy Special) or whatever, but they just do damage. It doesn't change the fact that all the Warrior is doing is smashing people with a sword, or all the Archer is doing is shooting people with a bow. They're just slightly different bow-shots or sword-smashes.

Meanwhile, the Mage's bubble and Fire Wall actually function other than just straight-up damage so that they're actually interesting and varied to play.

Playing as the Ents and Trolls (and Balrog) was fun at first, but they just felt clunky to control. the Balrog was a pain because it was so BIG that it obscured the camera, and they - like the others - were limited to the ground. In Battlefront, vehicles gave the game another dimension to control by necessitating control of the sky.

Judging the game on its own merits is easy. Because it's a lousy, phoned-in, half-assed game with barely-better-than-last-generation graphics, unintuitive controls (especially while controlling one of the "vehicles,") and an announcer that just won't shut up.

I have a friend who judges every game he plays on how many people he gets to kill and in what fashion, i.e. FPS's get up high on the charts while he views RPG's as incredibly boring. I have a feeling this is one of the few times that I'm judging this under that light, I played this game because I was interested in killing things.

To be honest when I played through the story I skipped all the cut-scenes because I knew the story so I don't even remember the announcer because I always had music blaring in the background and simply read the text if anything was said in-game.

I know that the game wasn't fallout 3, not even close, I think of it as average, something that I appreciate because I wanted to kill something as an orc, something that none of my other games could fulfill, but I know that if I went into the game expecting a good to excellent game I would have looked at this game as the steaming pile of crap you do.

I'm not going to be able to convince anyone of my views because they're primarily based on the mindset of killing, but even then I don't think this game is getting the treatment it deserves. If Pandemic came out with a game called: Fantasy Version of Battlefront , kept the same controls, made up some decent story and got rid of everything middle earth, you would be more lenient, you wouldn't have given this a perfect score, but it would have gotten something better than "a (morbidly curious) rent."