From the very first time I laid eyes on Lord of the Rings: Conquest at last year's Games Convention Asia, I had pegged this game to be a mindless yet enjoyable hack and slash title that would give Lord of the Rings (LoTR) fans a decent bang for their buck. It was after all being developed by Pandemic Games – the same bunch of people behind last year's most destructive game, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.
While my analysis of the game had been pretty spot on, I never thought this game would turn out to be this monotonous. But before we get ahead of ourselves and discuss the gameplay mechanics, here's a quick rundown of the story.
The campaign mode in Conquest has been divided into two parts – War of the Ring and Rise of Sauron. As the name suggests the War of the Ring is where you play all the good guys from J.R.R. Tolkien's universe enacting key moments from all three Lord of the Rings flicks. During every mission you'll be able to step into the boots of "Heroes" from time to time like Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf and so on. Be careful though; once the hero dies you'll have to spawn as a regular grunt who'll dish out barely half the damage as compared to your slain hero. Once you finish the entire campaign, you'll unlock Rise of Sauron – the part of the single player campaign where you actually play as the forces of darkness aka Sauron and his minions.
While this alternate look at the LoTR universe is cool no doubt, the game is bogged down tremendously by mundane and repetitive gameplay. You see every single mission plays out in pretty much the same way. You spawn at a particular location, choose your class (more on that in a bit), slay mindless minions with a limited repertoire of moves, capture a particular area, protect the captured area for a give amount of time, rinse and repeat x 100 times and boom! Game Over! Even while playing as the Orcs and other such evil oddities, gameplay still feels painfully generic as a result of which you can never really enjoy the game or the universe for that matter.
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