The Battle for Middle Earth in a different perspective.
What? You want more? Ok fine.
Lord of the Rings: Conquest is a fun 3rd person hack 'n' slash game kinda like its predecessor Battlefront, and offers an interesting new look at the War of the Ring. We all know the story of Frodo, the One Ring and Aragorn, the Ranger later turned King of Gondor; but what of the story of the average Joe in the ranks of the Gondorian Army? Or Fred, the brave Captain of the Rohirrim? Basically you play as a regular foot soldier in a greater army in a great battle for an even greater good.
Basically you run around and kill sh*t-In a flashy and seemingly epic way. The War of the Ring campaign takes you through places explored in the books and films: Starting out with the tutorial level in the War of the Last Alliance, Helms Deep, Minas Tirith, Pelennor Fields and the Black Gates. LotR: Conquest does offer a look into places mentioned in the book and film trilogy, but not seen to great extent like Minas Morgul the lair of the Witch King of Angmar.
Gameplay is pretty much the same as the Battlefront series except played out mostly via CQC. The classes are constant through out all factions, you have your basic Warrior class and Archer class, and two additional classes not explored by either book nor movie: The Scout class comprised "hit and run" tactics and the Mage class. While the Mage can attack the enemy combatants like any other class, its true prowess lies in the support of their allies. They can do actions such as healing wounded allies and deflecting hostile projectiles (which can get really annoying when employed against you) which can help turn the tide of battle.
Speaking of turning tides, Heroes are the biggest tide turners in this game. You can play as Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Gandalf, Faramir and Elrond , to name a few, in the War of the Ring campaign while the alternate ending campaign (dubbed the Rise of Sauron) you can play as Saruman, Sauron, the Witch King and even Saruman's subordinate Grima Wormtongue appears. In Campaign, you usually unlock them by completing story objectives and such while in Multiplayer they are unlocked by gaining the most points at the halfway mark of the match,
Now onto Multiplayer... oh wait it got taken down. But for what it was worth I played the single player version of multiplayer (kinda ironic huh?) and it was making me wish borrowed this game earlier. Plays out similarly as Campaign with different modes: Standard TDM, Hero TDM, Capture the Ring (think Oddball from Halo) and King of the Hill. It was pretty solid, and got me a few achievements owning as Legolas.
Time to get on to the cons of this game and there are quite a few. A major con to this game is that it is a reskin of Battlefront as I mentioned before. Among that it is also short and the replay value is short at its current multiplayer-less shape and the combos are monotonous its basically hitting the same OP X X X Y Y B combo to kill an insane amount of foes (you are basically treated like a God in terms of power level) Another thing that pissed me off was the whole "interactive battlefield" thing. Fell Beasts, when playing as the Free Peoples of Middle Earth, and Eagles, when playing as the Forces of Mordor, pick you up off of the ground and I cannot tell you how many times they did this to me on the Black Gates mission.
All in all Lord of the RIngs: Conquest falls a bit short to provide the LotR franchise with adequate justice. It's ambitious, I'll give it that, but it's too short and not worth the money to buy it. I suggest you rent it or borrow it from a friend, get your achievements and give it back. Kinda hope the Hobbit game will be better once the movies hit theaters December 2012 and 2013.