Remember that scene in "The Two Towers," where Legolas and Gimli were competing for kills, calling out their current tally? Lord of the Rings: Conquest is the videogame iteration on that concept. Take the beloved characters from Tolkien's rich fantasy setting and drop them into team deathmatch and capture the flag (capture the ring!) scenarios, missing the point in the process. Frodo isn't a backstab-happy rogue out to get as many cheap backstab kills as he can, he's a troubled, somber character who bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. This is a game that takes what is arguably the most relevant intellectual property to gamers outside of "Star Wars" and somehow manages to bleed it of its charm.

Pandemic Studios' plan for The Lord of the Rings Conquest was simple. Take the formula from Star Wars: Battlefront and apply it to the settings and characters from the Lord of the Rings films and books. The playable characters are generic archetypes split into four basic roles: warrior, archer, scout, and mage. Some artistic license was taken with these, of course, since Middle-earth is a low-magic world and isn't known for having teams of mages running around nuking each other with bolts of lightning. The classes aren't balanced particularly well either, with the mage being dominant in online matches in our experience.


The twin campaigns are fairly short; you'll be able to plow through them in an evening on the lower difficulty setting, which still manages to be painfully difficult at times, even to a fault. The good campaign follows the events of the films quite closely, while the evil campaign is a "what if?" scenario in which Frodo failed to destroy the One Ring and where you control the forces of evil, including Sauron himself. The unique characters are almost identical to the generics, however, with some cosmetic changes and scaled up powers. There's little that separates Gandalf from your garden-variety mage, except his spells are more powerful, while Aragorn is just a Warrior with some ghost powers.

If you're going to get extended play time out of your purchase, you're going to have to want to take part in the game's online component, where you can choose to side with the forces of good or evil in game types originally designed for shooters. Melee combat is particularly frustrating, as it's easy to end up swinging into empty space, and the camera often makes it difficult to get your bearings. For a game that is meant to recreate the epic large-scale conflicts from the films and books, you never really get the chance to take that scale properly into perspective.