The Lord of the Rings: Conquest

Sure, Lord of the Rings has a great, amazing story, but it also has some of the most epic battles ever put to film, and EA’s return to Middleearth reflects that. Pandemic, the studio behind Star Wars: Battlefront, is taking its popular style of battlefield mayhem to the land of orcs and oliphants, and an early demo made us feel like hobbit kids watching Gandalf’s fireworks. Multiplayer is where it’s at in games like these, and Conquest brings 16-player action to Xbox Live, along with four-player co-op in all modes and four-player split-screen, too.

But, of course, we’ll all play single-player as well, and Conquest opens as the Uruk’Hai charge at Helm’s Deep. As in Battlefront, you pick your character type from a carousel of options: archer, mage, defender, scout, and more. They each have special abilities (mages toss fireballs and can heal; archers play like third-person shooters), and if you choose unwisely, you can switch at any time. Helm’s Deep is a massive level, and while you’ll kick ladders off the wall and stop the suicidebomber orcs as usual, you’ll also scrap in places the film never showed, deep inside the mammoth mountain.

EA assured us that the game’s 13 other levels are equally big, and the sprawling war we saw at Pellinor Fields backed up that claim. Horses rush everywhere, fell beasts swoop in for a snack, and trolls trumpet your impending doom. We watched as a scout dashed through the mayhem, captured an enemy catapult, and used it to knock down a siege tower. That left one standing, so our intrepid scout scrambled nimbly atop a troll, ganked it, and placed a flare on the siege tower, which summoned a magical air strike from nearby Minas Tirith. Then we remembered to breathe. 

The campaign continues to familiar places (the Black Gate, Isengard) and to ones only hinted at even in the books — like Minas Morgul, the greenish castle that Frodo, Sam, and Gollum avoided while scrambling up the steep cliff. Once you complete this first campaign, you can go evil. The game assumes Frodo got caught dropping the ring into Mount Doom, and goes back through Moria, Weathertop, the Shire, and more, ending with a tumultuous battle at the Elven home of Rivendell.

Topping that, star players get to become heroes — everyone from Eowyn to the Ents, the Balrog to Legolas, and Aragorn to Sauron. And yes, the graphics Pandemic is cooking up are as pretty as these screens suggest. We’re sharpening our overpriced replicas of Sting as we speak!