Although Pandemic Studios’ Saboteur was sadly absent from this year’s E3 convention, the developer did show their upcoming return to the Star Wars: Battlefront formula, a sort of Battlefield-style, third-person multiplayer action feast. Only this time, Star Wars has been traded in for The Lord of the Rings and Battlefront for Conquest. The lasers, X-Wings and Force-enabled heroes are gone, replaced with bows, arrow quivers, tank-like trolls high fantasy adventurers. But the action, seemingly for better and for worse, remains the same in The Lord of the Rings: Conquest.
Click through for the goods.
Ending the Third Age in The Lord of the Rings: Conquest
Unlike the previous Battlefront games, single player action is front-and-center in The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. Divided into two campaigns, players first control the forces of good in Middle-Earth, defying Sauron as Frodo and Sam draw ever-closer to their goal in the heart of Mordor’s Mount Doom. Running through such familiar settings as Moria, Helm’s Deep, Isengard and Pelannor Fields, the battles eventually lead to the Black Gate where the land’s most powerful heroes buy time for their Hobbit friend to destroy the One Ring once and for all.
That is, until you start the second campaign. In this alternate storyline players take control of the Nazgul, who arrive at Mount Doom just in time to kill Frodo and claim the Ring for their master. You read it right – the bastards kill Frodo. And then proceed to march across Middle-Earth as an unstoppable force, crushing the forces of good in pitched battle after pitched battle. In what is surely a fan-servicing nod, the campaign ends with stops at Weathertop, Rivendell and the Hobbit-infested Shire. And players will get to Scour them all clean.
While we didn’t get to see any of those endgame levels at Electronic Arts’ Studio Showcase last week, we did get some hands-on time with both armies, in theaters as diverse as Mordor, Pelannor Fields, Rohan and Isengard. Those who are familiar with the Battlefront games will be right at home with Conquest’s map style and class selection. The big difference is that in the absence of lasers, combat is made much more personal.
Fighting the Wars of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings: Conquest
No longer is combat a target and fire affair. Even Conquest’s ranged characters are fully equipped to fight in close, though somewhat less competently of course. The X, Y and B buttons and an Xbox 360 gamepad deliver light, medium and heavy attacks, respectively. Pressing these buttons in different sequences leads to a variety of combo attacks. The LB button serves as a modifier; whenever an on-screen meter has some juice in it, press LB in conjunction with any attack buttons to deliver even more powerful attacks. For close-combat fighters, at least.
For ranged and magic classes, LB allows access to special ranged strikes and magic spells. Archers can fire endless volleys of arrows or they can access their special attacks with LB, allowing them to channel Legolas and let fly multiple arrows in a single shot. Mages have a chargeable lightning-based basic attack; LB lets them unleash other spells, such as fireball or heal. It’s not exactly true to Tolkien’s ideas concerning magic and Middle-Earth, but it sure is fun to fry the noble Riders of Rohan.
We also got to mess around with the more agile Scout class. While not a proper close-range fighter, Scouts excel at slipping around the outskirts of the battlefield and quietly bringing down targets one at a time. For this class, LB activates a stealth mode which renders the fighter invisible. Sneaking up to an enemy and pressing RB results in a quiet strike insta-kill.
Perform well with any of the classes, and you’ll unlock the ability to use a hero character. We saw Legolas, Gandalf and Aragorn for the forces of good and the Witch King for Sauron’s army, but there are surely others (the Balrog was mentioned as a hero). Heroes remain on the battlefield for as long as they are kept alive.
Some missions, such as the evil campaign’s Ring rescue in the bowels of Mount Doom, are relatively straightforward and linear. Following the on-screen pointers, kill whomever gets in the way and complete the goal. Others, such as the memorable battle on Pelannor Fields at the base of Minas Tirith, are multi-stage affairs which offer a variety of approaches to each objective.
At Pelannor, the first task is to take down a group of siege towers before the trolls pushing them forward reach the front lines. A fighter character has no problem withdrawing to the rear lines, where catapults sit waiting to be manned. A scout, on the other hand, can create a diversion to draw the troll away from the tower. Once that’s done, he can use his special ability to set the Middle-Earth equivalent of C4 on it, bringing the siege weapon down.
Next up is the Oliphaunts. Close-combat characters can run in, climb up the great beastie’s leg and engage in a good, old QTE to bring the thing down. It sounds easy, but climbing up a moving Oliphaunt’s leg and along its body is no cakewalk. We didn’t actually witness any alternate methods for killing the Oliphaunts, but ranged attackers are apparently not without their options. Legolas can also be unlocked during this battle, though he takes the close combat approach. He just gets it done a lot quicker.
The Lord of the Rings: Conquest looks like it will definitely appeal to fans of Battlefront, especially those who also appreciate Tolkien’s fantasy world. We can’t quite shake the feeling that the game is just a couple years too late – there doesn’t seem to be any real incentive to keep players playing online (ie no persistent elements) – but the single player campaigns ought to give the offline experience more mileage than the average Battlefront game had. The Lord of the Rings: Conquest seems to be very much an iteration on older ideas, but even now, months shy of the game’s November release, it looks decent, plays well and offers plenty of fan service for the Tolkien-loving gamers out there.
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