This Lord Of The Rings style battlefront game will keep you on your toes till the end.
The game follows the template laid out by Pandemic's previous Star Wars: Battlefront series, comprised of four different types of soldier, fight to gain or hold territory in a series of locations plucked straight from Peter Jackson's cinematic trilogy. As soon as your soldier's health bar is depleted in battle, you spawn as a new one until your clutch of lives is gone and the game is over. At key points you assume the role of one of the story's famous heroes - Gandalf, Aragorn, Saruman, The Witch King and so on - depending on which side you're playing for, and this character faces up against an opposing hero in what's supposed to be a grand conclusion to the stage.
The campaign, which can be played in single-player, split-screen or in co-op over PSN or Xbox Live, is divided into two distinct halves: The War of the Ring, in which you fight for the good guys across eight stages beginning at Helm's Deep and ending at The Black Gate, and The Rise of Sauron, comprised of seven stages leading from Mount Doom to The Shire. The four classes - Warriors, Archers, Mages and Scouts - are the same on each side, as are their moves. As the Warrior you have access to three standard attacks, a throwing axe and three magical attacks. These inputs can be strung together into combos as you hack and slash your way through the enemy throng, like a deadly spinning top. The Scout is the second close-range class, a stealth warrior who can cloak himself with temporary invincibility and assassinate enemies from behind.
As the Archer you can fire an almost continuous volley of arrows at enemies, with three additional special attacks (poison arrows, flaming arrows and a volley) on offer to deal extra damage when their respective gauges are filled. And finally, as the Mage you can cast spells from your staff, in much the same way as the archer's arrow, as well as healing yourself and your comrades and creating an impervious magical shield for those around you. The heroes you play as generally fall into one of these four classes too, so the move-list is consistent throughout the game.
The four classes are mostly balanced, slightly favouring the archer for those players with a steady eye: headshots will kill most enemies in one hit, while hacking at them with swords will take three or four. Magic refills as you attack and so, when caught in a close scuffle, you can drain and refill your magic attack gauge in seconds (especially when playing as the Warrior), slicing through enemies with wide, sweeping magical gestures while simultaneously recouping the power to repeat the movements moments later.
The level design is quite good, featuring maps that lookalike to the book or films, and there is a great variety of choice between them, there are also different types of gameplay that you can meddle around with, including a Capture the Ring mode, which is basically a Capture the flag mode where you have to capture the enemy's ring and deliver it to your base, also there is Team Deathmatch, and also a Conquest mode where you have to take control of various strategic positions to gain that little bit more on the Enemy.
The campaign was great, and it felt like i was actually fighting the battles from the movies which was fantastic, Hugo Weaving's commentary is awesome. The different difficulties vary in the game including Normal, Heroic and Legendary, which is also good.
There were only a handful of things that i didn't really like about the game, such as there were many cheap ways of being slain, which include being strung in a chain of combo's by a warrior or a scout and being unable to evade these chains (which is impossible) and brutally slaughtered in the process, another is getting back stabbed by enemy scouts, i guess you always have to be on your guard but it is difficult to keep track of them, but other than these minor flaws the game really impressed me.
I will give Lord Of The Rings Conquest a 9, for its immersive storyline and gameplay, well done creators :)