Conquest Online = Epic Fail

Lord of the Rings Conquest is a game I enjoyed playing, or should I say I enjoyed playing upto a point, That point being when I jumped online to play a few games. The story mode is pretty good overall and plays quite similar to the Star Wars Battlefront series, as you strive to take over all of the bases and defeat the bosses such as the Balrog or Elrond.

There are four different units to play as in the game as you go about the task at hand, such as the warrior who as you would expect just hacks and slashes his way through the enemy horde, with his special attack setting his sword on fire to do more damage. The Warrior can take a fair bit of damage and is one of the strongest characters in the game.


You can also play as the Archer, a character that has a few different arrows such as a poison arrow and a flame arrow, with the best special move being his triple shot. As you would expect the archer is a ranged fighter that isn't great at close combat.

Then we have the Scout, the scout is one sneaky bastard with the ability to turn invisible and sneak behind foes before killing them with one strike. The Scout is probably one of the characters I enjoyed playing as the most with the Archer.

Finally the last standard unit is the Mage, the mage can drop a fireball which kills enemies as they walk over it as well as having the ability to heal himself and other units. It is a shame that he is weak as shit and dies in 2 hits otherwise I probably would have used the character a lot more.
Joining the 4 standard units we have the Heroes and Villans that the Lord of the Rings universe is known for, such as the biggest bad ass of them all the Balrog. Most of these are just more powerful versions of the standard units, some are fun to play as while others are just a pain in the ass.

As I said the game is pretty short in all with about 6 or 7 missions to each campaign. So what is left to do after the single player? Online multiplayer of course and this is where the game starts to become a let down. Units seem to be unfairly balanced in the online mode, with some characters being a joke. After you get so many points in a game online you get asked if you want to become a hero. So you pick yes only to be let down when you find out you have ended up as Gimli. Gimli is probably the worst character to play as online, he just seems really weak and you get pissed off as your charcter does no damage at all.


There is no party system as such so you have to invite your friends into each game, and you can't pick to play on any level as the servers have the maps on an endless loop. So the only way to skip the map that your thought was a bag of cack is to quit out and join a new game.

Online the game is crap and it could have been fantastic if only they made some changes such as....

• A party system that works
  
• The ability to make sure your friends end up on your side
• Balanced units making the game fun
• Being able to vote to skip maps
• Gimli being removed from the game for being fucking useless

With just these few things being fixed the game could go from being a lame piece of cack nobody will be playing online in 2 weeks time, to being a real contender for peoples attention and an alternative to the usual crap like Gears 2 and World At War.

Ah well hopefully we will see that Star Wars: Battlefront 3 game get a release on the 360 sometime soon, one thing is for sure I won't be playing this game until it arrives.