In my many years of experience on this earth I’ve come to accept that there are only two types of people in the world, those who revere the works of JRR Tolkien and terrorists. Actually that might be an unfair assessment, I’m sure there are terrorists that enjoy The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as much as I do. When I first saw The Fellowship of the Ring at the movies, dragging my soon to be wife even though she was suffering from the flu, a tear streamed down my cheek in those opening moments when Gandalf’s wagon cleared the hill into the Shire. I’ve even tried to convince one of my children’s teachers to allow my son to use Gandalf when writing about a person of historical significance. So take it from me when I say that Lord of the Rings: Conquest is not so great.

Unfortunately it has the deck stacked against it right from the start. Firstly, it comes from the same Pandemic team who made the first two Star Wars: Battlefront games which were fun, albeit short lived, simplistic shooters featuring the Star Wars characters across a number of battles. The Battlefront games weren’t that bad, but Lucasarts felt they were bad enough to hand the franchise reins over to Haze developer Free Radical who was doing something far more interesting with it before they financially collapsed. Second problem, for both the good guys and villains campaigns, it takes some pretty big liberties with the story, which most won’t be bothered by and others will find unforgivable. Suffice to say if the minor story changes in the film adaptations bothered you, the game will have you making threatening ex girlfriend style calls to Pandemic staff late on a Friday night.

In related news the recent closure of Pandemic’s studio in Australia was due to a licensing deadline for a Batman game. EA was about to lose it and tried to have a game churned out quickly; it was a money haemorrhaging nightmare and cost a lot of people their jobs. It’s not hard to imagine that Lord of the Rings: Conquest was the result of a very similar attempt at a quick stab before the license expired; just in this case a far more successful attempt. EA has had the permits to make Lord of the Rings games for about eight years and only managed two mediocre hack and slash movie tie-ins and two pretty decent strategy games. Then, instead of a decent role playing adventure game set in Middle earth utilising all the gorgeous designs and character models available from Jackson’s Weta Studios, we get the quickest game Pandemic could produce; a game based on an existing engine. There’s little to convince the learned gamer that this isn’t a cash grab. For the first few hours I enjoyed Lord of the Rings: Conquest, quietly assuming that the early lack of depth was the developers holding the cards close to their chest before the real action. Unfortunately no matter how far I waded into the kiddies pool, the depth stayed depressingly the same.

The game features four separate classes. The warrior, your tank with plenty of muscle power but no range, the archer, your long range sniper, the ranger/rogue, who can turn invisible and back stab and your medic, sorry I mean wizard, who can heal shield and throw out some explosive attacks. At about the halfway mark in each battle you can unlock a hero character such as Aragorn, Legolas or Gimli. While these characters have about twice the power and health of the basic classes they are, for the most part, identical. Aragorn is a warrior, Legolas an Archer and Gandalf a wizard. To be fair, playing as these characters and hearing the canned dialogue from the film as you wade into Uruk Hai is fun for the first bunch of battles, after that it becomes a touch tedious. The combat is a little deeper than you might expect from the Star Wars Battlefront games. Each character has multiple attacks for different situations and it takes a bit of practice to work out the best tactics for each class. Things like hanging around wizards for healing and using rangers to capture points you need to learn on the fly.

The good news is that a few interesting characters can also be used including Ent’s, Troll’s and the Balrog. You can also ride a few animals including horses, wargs and in one level a murmakil (those giant elephants). Unfortunately the riding controls are terrible and attacking is next to impossible. Strangely it’s far more fun to kill a murmakil than it is to ride one. Then there’s the little things, like the fact the hero characters only have one outfit and Aragorn’s is his Gondorian armour, even at the battle of Helms Deep. It cheapens the experience when there’s so little variation in the characters. In comparison to a similar game, Dynasty Warriors manages to have five times as many hero characters, all available from the start, with multiple selectable outfits and weapons, bigger battle fields and more enemies on screen at once. Taking damage is another sore point. If you get knocked down you need to roll to get up; problematic if you fall down near a cliff. Likewise your animation to stand up is so slow an enemy, particular warriors, can lay a lot of damage on your prone ass while you’re making a quick cup of tea during the stand up animation. Against a sword wielding enemy an archer or ranger is likely to get knocked down and then killed in a few frustrating seconds.

The single player campaign could be knocked out in a day or two but the long term life of the game really lies in the multiplayer. Or at least it would if EA didn’t force you to sign up online for and then join one of their own state side servers. It’s not friendly, it’s not inviting and offers a bunch of services that should purely be voluntary. The whole point of Live is a quick and simple method of getting into online gaming and having the special EA gate to get into their yard is a bad policy. If you can then find an online game they are often depressingly laggy and an entire team compromised of archers is almost unstoppable. Online matches currently available are conquest, capture the ring, team deathmatch and hero deathmatch. Coop play of the single player campaign is only available as splitscreen but it’s still pretty decent and the best way to enjoy a game is with a friend in the same room.

If you try to impress girls in bars by speaking elvish (it doesn’t work) then chances are you’ve all ready bought, or decided against getting, this game and passed your own judgement on it. If you enjoyed the films or have kids or pensioners living with you who love the films then it’s definitely worth a rental. But if you were hoping for an exciting and involving Lord of the Rings game that captured the magic of the films and the depth of the books you should maybe try Lord of the Rings Online. How the notoriously difficult Tolkien estate approved this game I’ll never know, I can only imagine it involved a lot of money changing hands. Hopefully the next studio to snap up the rights to the Lord of the Rings universe, which as the next two films are fast approaching should be soon, will have a long term plan to create some dedicated and respectful titles rather than treating the franchise like a money cow to be roughly milked to death.