Lord of the Rings: Conquest PS3 Demo

I’ve been a pretty avid fan of Lord of the Rings for some time now, sad to say I’ve bought a lot of the games, and was generally disappointed. Today marks the release of the Lord of the Rings: Conquest PS3 Demo, it is free to download in the Playstation Store. It is a hefty 1.3GB and it includes a quick tutorial and a great multiplayer experience. Needless to say this should be but a portion of the actual game.

To put the game into context, the Lord of the Rings Conquest is a game by Pandemic Studios and is set to be released in January 13th, 2009 on the XBOX 360, PS3, PC and the DS. I wasn’t particularly excited in this action game because let’s just say the scope of some of the movie licensed games were absolutely disappointing, but the name Pandemic Studios shed a bit of hope. They are best known for developing the Starwars Battlefront series. So I set out to download the demo, and I was fairly impressed.

Let’s begin with the tutorial. As expected, the Battle of the Last Alliance was the center piece for the tutorial. There was a nice video with clips from the movie and even some parallels within the lines. Then you get into the fighting mechanics, you start as a Gondorian warrior. It teaches you how to use the buttons to fight, block, move, etc, a fairly standard button masher. Then as you fight, you charge a bar at the bottom that lets you unleash stronger attacks, still a bit bland. The controls were a bit sluggish, the warrior class didn’t really do it for me. Then you fight your way to a flag bearing the sign of Mordor. Standing in it for a period of time captures it. When you are by one of your own zones, you can click R1 to change classes. At that point, the only other class available was the archer.

I was was much more impressed with the archer class. The controls were much tighter, much more responsive, and it actually worked. You can click buttons to fire, and zoom, or swap types of arrows. You can even shoot multiple arrows. The two analog sticks function as any standard shooter to aim and move. And even cooler is the fact that there are multiple types of arrows. The fire arrows blow your opponents back, buying you a bit of time when you fight against a crowd, whereas the poison arrows slow the enemy while hurting them. Once again, you work your way past a whole crowd or orcs and you get to change class again, this time to a scout.

The scout is a tough class to play, but ultimately a very strong class. The scouts can turn invisible for a long period of time (actually more of a blur, I found out the hard way), unless they are hit. When invisible, the bar used by the warrior class to pull off special moves gets drained. The idea of the scout is to sneak behind an enemy and press R1 to initiate a fairly devastating attack. In the tutorial it is a guaranteed fatality, whereas stronger characters on multiplayer such as trolls and ents are only severely hurt. The rest of the scout’s moves are simply weaker, shorter versions of the warrior class. You have your fast swiping of the dagger or the slower jab, etc.

At last, you make your way to a whole crowd of orcs, and you are given the last class (perhaps for the demo only?), which is the mage class. These guys are good for support and only good for support. All of their spells look absolutely fantastic, and it just makes the game feel alive. The L1 and L2 buttons make the mage class the support class, L1 heals everyone around you (including yourself) for a bit of health, and can be used every 20 seconds or so. L2 summons a sort of dome shield with a fairly large radius. The dome protects anyone inside from projectiles, including arrows and spells. Of course, the mage also has a lightning zap which can hit multiple enemies but seems fairly weak and needs quite a bit of accuracy to pull off. And you have the fire bomb, which throws a sort of fireball at the floor in front of you, setting it on fire. Any enemies that pass through it gets hurt quite a bit. You also have a melee attack which involves some cool swinging of their staffs, or a blast around you, both doing fairly minimal damage.

The most impressive aspect of the game, which I discovered only when playing online, is the fact that you can do a lot of cool stuff from things in the environment. In the Minas Tirith level, there were these cannons in key areas that you can use. Perhaps no one realized they were there because I seemed to be the only one using them, but you can shoot enemies and do some heavy damage. There are also horses that you find in the stables of the Shire, you simply click R1 to mount them and you can move across the battlefield in half the time. All of the classes function the same when mounted on a horse, you simply get to attack the enemy directly beside you on either side.

Finally we have the trolls and ents on the battlefield. Some of the locations (marked by flags) are extremely important because they are the location where ents and trolls spawn. You either see a oddly shaped tree that isn’t moving or a giant shell. You approach either of them and press R1 to control the ent or troll. They are extremely buff and honestly it takes the entire team to take one down. They walk extremely slowly but can heal at any point and if you get hit once or twice by their flailing limbs you are pretty much a goner. You can even grab units straight from the ground and throw them away.

When you have a certain amount of kills, you can become a hero, in the demo, I believe only the Witch King and Gandalf are available. I’m not sure if I was playing them right, but they seemed awfully weak, especially after the hard work to get them. Perhaps they are only there to mark a strong player and that the other team should focus on killing them first.

I have to say first that the game is surprisingly balanced. All of the classes have their strengths, and I found myself playing all the classes equally. It’s true that I got less kills with a mage than as an archer, but having mages on the team seems to be absolutely crucial, as are archers, scouts and warriors. I noticed that the teams that lose often are the ones that don’t have a balance in the classes, they are almost all warriors or mages (probably because they look so cool in comparison to the scount and archer). And that balanced teams are the more successful teams. Also the use of the trolls and ents are employed fairly well. They are extremely strong, but because the spawn is at the center of the map, the control swaps often.

What I also praise is the fact that there is an incredible amount of players online. Albeit it has only been one day since the release of the demo, and the demo is free, but still, there are more people online in this game than Battle for Middle Earth or any other Lord of the Rings game. There isn’t a lot of lag and it was easy to connect. Online was an absolute blast. 16 players, arrows flying ahead and fireballs ahead while riding a horse in the very familiar city of Minas Tirith makes for an awesome game.

I think that the game is nice and all, probably as good as a Lord of the Rings game will ever get, but there are definitely some weak points. First the graphics, they are decent, but let’s face it, there are games with similar objectives and much better graphics. They aren’t bad, but some of the buildings in the Shire just look out of place, the grass looks like it came from the last generation and the character models aren’t great either. We also have the really annoying narrator. In the introduction video, it was acceptable, but the narrator who pops in saying that one team only needs another 50 points to win or something has the most boring voice ever. It’s almost as if he’s asleep. I noticed that these were mainly instructional, so perhaps it isn’t part of the final game but merely tacked onto the demo, but still, it cheapened the whole package. I definitely hope there are more classes in the real game because the diversity is pretty limited right now. And finally, being a huge Lord of the Rings fan, I find some of the spells and arrows to be a little out of place in a Lord of the Rings setting. The mages for example, shouldn’t be there at all.

Overall, this demo was pretty good. I was expecting absolutely nothing from it, but got a pretty good experience instead. There are some points of weaknesses, some bugs, but overall I really liked the game. If it is indeed as large a game as the trailers seem to indicate and lives up to the demo, I think I will probably pick it up. As it stands now, I think the demo is worth downloading and playing, and I am eager to see what the actual game has in store.

EDIT: I did some reading up, and it seems that the multiplayer is one of the many modes offered in the real game. The mode played in the demo is called conquest mode.