The Lord of the Rings: Conquest Preview

Conquest lets you play in some of the classic battles from the films, and a few others.

So yes, Conquest's characters look pretty good. The maps themselves are a bit less inspiring: most of the locations from the films are there - Isengard, Pelennor Fields, Mines of Moria Carey - but they lack any real "wow" factor; they're just not particularly exciting. Perhaps it's just the way they look, or perhaps it's the fact that they only have a maximum of 16 people fighting there at any given time. As we said, 16 is a far more workable number for this kind of combat - but it doesn't feel massively Lord of the Rings-y.

All the same, the team-based matches we played certainly had their moments - and we reckon that Lord of the Rings fans could easily spend a few happy hours with them. However, you've probably detected a note of uncertainty in our tone. Because our concerns with LOTR: Conquest do not lie so much with what we have seen, but rather what we have not.

We could talk about the Ringbearer multiplayer mode - which was supposed to let one player be Frodo while everyone else became ring-wraiths and chased him. That sounded like a pretty cool idea, but it seems to have disappeared. Still, that's not our major worry. Our larger concern with this game is the single-player campaign - or rather, the fact that we've not seen it yet.

We've not seen anything of the single-player game, but the multiplayer's good fun.

You see, multiplayer scrapping is all well and good, but since Conquest is understandably unable to deliver epic-scale warfare in this mode, the burden to deliver this experience rests upon the main game. This being the case, you'd expect EA to have shown it off somewhere - especially since the final product is due for release next month, But we've not been shown it. Now, there may be a good reason for this reticence... but we can't think of one. We're certainly not going to condemn something we've not seen, but it's a puzzling move at best.

What we've been told is that the single-player game will let you fight your way through all the major battles from the film, fighting to accomplish strategic goals while the conflict rages around you. You'll start by playing through the plot of the book/film, climaxing at the Battle of the Black Gate, then you'll get to play through an alternative "What If?" scenario that pretends the hobbits failed in their quest. The first mission in this campaign will let you take on the role of a Nazgul that kills Frodo and Sam, perhaps winning some overdue revenge for the thirty-minute ending that dragged down Return of the King. You'll then help Sauron's army to trash their way through Middle Earth, eventually destroying the Shire and wiping out the population of Rivendell. Then you'll start selling cigarettes to primary-school kids because it'll be the only evil thing left to do.

On paper, this sounds pretty cool - particularly since both campaigns are supposed to feature online co-op play for up to four people, and over 150 AI enemies on-screen at once. If Pandemic pulls it off, then this should make for quite an experience - and it'll have a fairly enjoyable multiplayer mode to go with it. As things stand, we can only confirm the latter half of that supposition - so for the time being, there's still a question mark over this game.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest is due out for Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Nintendo DS on January 16, 2009.