The Lord of the Rings: Conquest

How the developer of Star Wars: Battlefront and the publishers of the Battlefield series let this one out the door in this state I will never understand.

Very much throwaway gaming, Conquest is wholly lacklustre, devoid of any real purpose, and is a real low point for Pandemic, which after Mercenaries 2 is really saying something. 'Must do better' is a gross understatement.

Conquest is a third person 16-player brawl around some of Tolkien’s most famous landmarks, marred by poor visuals, unintuitive controls and repetitive gameplay.

A disappointing experience. Whilst there are moments of greatness; such as playing as an Elk and splattering fields of Orcs with boisterous branches, the rest is a travesty.

A beloved fantasy franchise loses its most distinctive quality -- the epic scope of its battles, backdrops, characters and themes -- in Electronic Arts misguided and poorly executed Lord of the Rings: Conquest. The game boils down each of the trilogy's great battles to a series of compact, generic missions that rarely resemble anything seen in Middle Earth.

Amazingly, EA are still surprising us, but for all of the wrong reasons. Who knew that they still had the capacity to deliver such awful, creaky, shoddily-constructed software? Once a seemingly forgotten page in EA's coloured history, we can only hope that this disgrace to the near-legendary universe that Tolkien crafted is simply an anomaly.

Trying to balance the ceaseless button-mashing with the necessary manual camera tweaking is a bad joke, and often leaves you slashing just out of view and hoping for the best. [Mar 2009, p.93]