I’m not a big fan of the Lord of the Rings universe. Sure, I’ve seen and appreciated all three movies but I wouldn’t know a Frodo Baggins from a Bilbo Baggins. With this limited knowledge of the LOTR franchise I cautiously approached the latest Lord of the Rings (LOTR) game at the Games Convention Asia 2008.

Unlike previous LOTR games like Battle for Middle Earth that were all about strategy, LOTR Conquest is an all-out action game from Pandemic Games, the same folk behind the uber-destructive Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. It's also the first LOTR game that’ll allow players to play as both the good and the evil side; unfortunately I only had some quick hands-on time with the good folk. My task in the demo was to protect some place from an Orc invasion, and to do so I could play as one of four classes – Warrior, Archer, Mage, and Scout.

Now I didn’t get to play as Mage or Scout, thanks to the long line of gamers and journalists behind me, but I did cut down hundreds of Orcs playing as Warrior and Archer. Like any other hack-and-slash game on the block, you have your heavy, light, and charged-up attacks for the Warrior that can be mixed and matched to dish out some serious damage.

As I progressed through the level I came across check points that had to be captured along with my compadres while fending off tons of enemies. While this sounds like fun on paper it wasn’t all that appealing, thanks to the game’s dumber than a doorknob AI. My teammates pretty much sat around doing jack while I ran to and fro killing Orcs (I’m sure this won’t be a problem in the co-op the game offers) while trying to capture a strategic point. Once that was done, I was told to change my character class to an Archer since I had a lot of ranged opponents to kill soon.

As soon as I transformed into an Archer, so did all my teammates, and in a matter of minutes we were laying waste an army of Orcs using nothing but our speed and arrows. While an Archer is not armed with any other weapon, he must work out like mad on his legs since once kick from him is enough to end the life of an incoming Orc.

As Archer my goal remained pretty much the same – kill a truckload of Orcs, capture a strategic point, move on. As I mentioned earlier, the huge line behind me forced me to cut short my time with this game but it was enough to establish a couple of things. For starters, the game is mindless fun and if you love the LOTR universe you’ll really dig it. Secondly, Pandemic needs to drastically improve the game’s AI as it's beyond dumb – I came across enemies just walking around a freaking battlefield waiting for me to find and kill them.

Lastly, the game looks pretty mediocre, so polishing it up a notch and fixing the frame rates should be on the priority list as well before it ships this November for the Xbox360, PS3 and PC.