Lord of the Rings Conquest Review

I recently was given a free copy of the Electronic Arts title Lord of the Rings: Conquest. Initially I was excited to have a new, not to mention free of charge, game to play. Being a fan of the books, movies, and other epic tales of journey and fellowship. I remember a few older Lord of the Rings titles being pretty fun games so I thought this one may follow suit. Could I have been more wrong?

Is Lord of the Rings: Conquest the worst game I have ever played? That’s hard to say. Normally, when I come across a game this poor I simply made the mistake of renting the game. Thus, such terrible games quickly fade from memory. This time, I actually own it.

Why is this game so bad? I’ll give you one example. As soon as I got home with my free copy, I grabbed a friend for some co-op action. We started playing and quickly completed our first objective. Our second task was to kill all our enemies known as “torchbearers”, who are trying to set fire to the wall at Helm’s Deep. Being a bit of a Rambo personality when it comes to video games, I ran into the thick of the action as a warrior and slayed all the oncoming torchbearers. I returned to the wall to join my friend playing as an archer so we could fight off the remaining baddies. To make a short story long, the horde never stopped coming and the story never progressed. We sat on a wall for well over a half hour just killing bad guys. Then we had to restart the game. This time when we encountered the torchbearers, I remained on the wall. After the last “torchbearer” was killed the game immediately gave us our next objective and we started rolling on through the story.

Why did I tell this story? Because, what game glitches so awfully that one the first run-through on the very first level that a player is forced to start over? A terribly made game with a severe lack of oversight. This is an easy bug that could have and should have been worked out by beta testers, but I suppose that step was skipped in order to grab more money more quickly under the Lord of the Rings franchise. Embarrassing.

What else is wrong with this game? Well I will need to provide you a list, but I will state quite easily, everything.

1) Gameplay and controls are terribly sluggish.

2) You play as four classes of characters: Archer, Warrior, Mage, Scout

3) You rarely play as actually characters from the films

4) Cut scenes are clear indicators of the game’s function as a simple money grab. They are merely cliché clips from the film that are haphazardly thrown together.

5) Graphics are great…if this was an Xbox original game. Why make a game for next-gen consoles that looks worse than PS2 games?

The good, well there really isn’t any. The only positive I can bring myself to mutter about this game is that it will provide a few hours of fun and laughter with a friend at the developers’ expense. Yea it’s that bad.

By all means do whatever is necessary to avoid renting or buying this game. It is terrible.