In terms of combat with the Warrior and Scout – unless I was missing a pretty big trick it's focussed around light, medium and hard attacks done either with L1 held (when you've built up sufficient energy) or without L1 held. When L1 is held, you'll do attacks that are a bit fancy – the Warrior's sword sets on fire, for example. When it isn't, you'll do standard attacks. You can do combos. I've seen lists of them. But, largely, button-mashing does the trick. Accurately pulling off a combo doesn't seem to look any different, nor does it seem to inflict any extra damage.
Periodically you'll get the chance to play as a 'Hero' – one of the major characters from the books. It breaks up gameplay and it's nice to get to play as Gimli or Legolas, but they don't do a vast amount that the regular class members don't, slotting neatly into one of the four character types as they do. Basically, they're harder than the regular characters. At first I thought they were being earned by me being double awesome and having done in a large amount of enemies, but it became apparent that isn't the case. They just seem to pop up at pre-prescribed moments. They break up the game a bit, but they don't bring a huge amount to the table.
Story-wise, the game follows the books. Except for when it doesn't. OK - it follows the events, but Pandemic's also taken certain liberties. I'm not that inclined to be a continuity whore, but there are people out there who will be. Frankly, if you make a
LOTR game, you're inviting them to the party. Mostly, you get soldiers where there shouldn't be any – at Isengard as the Ents storm the tower, in Moria as trolls go on the rampage. I'm also pretty sure there weren't as many mages in the books as there seem to be littering the battlefields of
Conquest. I found it a mild annoyance, but felt OK about the necessity of having them in there to maintain the game's core mechanic. If you're not going to be OK with that... well, you've been warned.
Because for the majority of the game you're playing as a Joe Blogs, there's also something of a lack of sense of accomplishment. You've seen the events you're playing through in the books and on screen and you know they weren't relying on the presence of your anonymous character. At the end of a given battle you're left with the experience of having been there, but not of having been important.
One of the selling points of
Conquest is the ability to play as evil characters. That's fine, but they adhere to the same classes and moves as their nicey-nice counterparts, meaning that playing through as the baddies serves to lengthen the game rather than enrich it.
