The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (PlayStation 3)

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest puts the player right in the middle of the most famous battle of the Third Age including the assaults on Helm’s Deep and Gondor and the battle at the Black Gate. In two campaigns the player either fights for the forces of good or the forces of evil and leads them to victory.

Similar to Star Wars: Battlefront, the player can choose from up to four classes and looks him over the shoulder while moving him over the battlefield: The warrior rushes into the crowd and fights his enemy up close and has the ability to unleash powerful combos. The mage is more focused on protecting his friends from incoming fire or healing them but has also access to a shock wave and a powerful lightning strike. The scout on the other hand turns invisible and kills even the most powerful enemy with a small stab in the back or attaches a bomb to an enemy and sends him back to his friends. The last is the Archer who prefers to stay in the back unleashing a rain of fire or poison arrows on the enemy. But each of the classes requires energy to perform the more powerful attacks which is gained by simply killing enemies.

Besides the usual weaponry a class carries like swords or daggers, the player can also find and use catapults stationed on the battlefield or get on the back of a horse to get the advantage and thin the enemy horde just by sprinting through it.

After choosing a class, the player is dropped at the first spawn point of the current map and is then required to help his allies to help fulfill different objectives depending on the game mode and map. These can range from capturing and defending positions to killing the enemy hero. While in single player the heroes on both sides are called when needed and fit the current map (like the Gandalf and the Balrog in the Mines of Moria), in multiplayer the best player of one team is automatically chosen once his team has reached a certain percentage of points needed to win.

The multiplayer mode also allows up to four players to play together through the campaigns and features three additional game modes: In “Conquest”, similar to Battlefield 2142, the goal is to capture flag points on the map in a pre-determined order and once all points are held by one team, the game is over. In “Team-Deathmatch” the team with the most kills wins the game and “Find the Ring” is a “Capture the Flag”-variant featuring the one ring instead of a flag.