Lord of the Rings: Conquest Hands-On

We've played Pandemic and EA's Tolkein action epic to bring you these fresh impressions.

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Torn between the attractions of tiring out our sword arm, stabbing unshielded buttock or splatting the foe with lumps of magical lava, we don't give much thought to the Archer class till another match type, Capture The Ring, demonstrates the usefulness of its different ammo types. Capture The Ring is exactly what it sounds like: the One Ring spawns somewhere in the area, and your team has to grab it and return it to your base. Ring carrying has its disadvantages (well duh): you can still fight, but movement is reduced to a waddle and an on-screen indicator will broadcast your location to the other team.

Fighting for Good this time (we're fickle like that) within the eerie green battlements of Minas Morgul, we slow down enemy Ring carriers still further with poisoned arrows, or call on an explosive-tipped variety to knock them flat. The Archer's Multishot, which sends three arrows singing out in a horizontal arc, is a good way to jolt a wily Scout into the open, or thin the ranks of an advancing mob. The flipside of this flexibility at range, of course, is that you're about as sturdy as an egg-and-cress sandwich in melee.

Then there's the titular Conquest mode, which is all about capturing and defending spawn points across the map to bolster your team's score, while preventing the other side from doing likewise, naturally. Victory goes to whoever clocks up a thousand points first, or manages to secure all the spawn points. Battles flow and ebb naturally as first one and then the other team gains the ascendancy, whether through teamwork or periodic opportunities to play a Hero character, like the huge fiery Balrog. You'll get a shot at being a Hero if you're ahead of your team-mates on points, and screen-clearing whoop-arse is the unvarying result.

The map we play in Conquest, the Shire, also introduces us to the game's "vehicles". This being high fantasy rather than modern warfare, these rides are biological in nature: ferocious wolf-like Wargs, lumbering Trolls, leafy Ents and rubbish old horses. The Wargs and horses are good for getting around at speed, but make you rather easier to hit in the fray, while Ents and Trolls mop the floor with nearby opposition but are too slow to catch frantically back-pedalling ranged assailants. If you can get behind a player "driving" one of the latter two, you can clamber up their back with a button press and execute a murderous QTE.

A good laugh though all this proves to be, we're inclined to get a bit tetchy on the question of feature sets. The core balancing act of classes and maps just about holds up, but being limited to eight players a side and a scant three match types (two of which are Heroic/non-Heroic variations on a theme) seems rather miserly given some of the shooters we've been playing recently.

This wouldn't be so much of an issue if the multiplayer were a secondary asset, but there's the lingering suspicion that the single player mode, kept firmly off-limits during our hands-on, will be as superfluous as those of the Battlefront games: a series of multiplayer matches against the AI linked by a montage of film clips and some dutiful star voiceovers. There's the pleasantly twisted prospect of fighting for Sauron's cause, leading his armies from the ruined docklands of Osgiliath through the repopulated Mines of Moria to Rivendell and the Shire itself, but this could be little more than an excuse to play the game's ten or so maps in reverse.

First announced in May and power-blasted through development towards a January 2009 release, Conquest has all the hallmarks of a quick-and-dirty attempt to milk a lucrative license using well-worn action archetypes, a fun but formidably by-the-numbers mashfest. Odds are readers will have deduced all this from the visuals, which are never more than passable: the character models and environments are detailed enough, but the effects fail to dazzle and the animations lack that all-important sense of physicality: you never feel like you're really interacting with anything in the world. Given a decent campaign and inspired takes on some of the more memorable bits from the films - Moria, Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith in particular - Pandemic could rescue Conquest from its own lacklustre heritage, but first impressions suggest you'll want to rent before taking the plunge.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest is due out for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and Nintendo DS on 9th January 2009.

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