The Lord of the Rings: Conquest Review (PS3)

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is an action-adventure video game released on the Playstation 3 and developed by Pandemic Studios. We all know what Lord of the Rings is, and how much potential it has for a video game. So did Pandemic live up to that potential? Let's take a look.

Story : One cool thing is you can choose to be evil. For any Lord of the Rings fans, you'll probably want to pick this up for this reason alone. It's a kind of Marvel style ''What If?'' story. Frodo doesn't destroy the ring and keeps it for himself! I know you Tolkien fans out there are instantly interested now.

Graphics : There are serious problems with the graphics. In fact I think these are the worst graphics out of any Playstation 3 game. That isn't a hard feat, considering most games these days have excellent graphics. Regardless, this can't be ignored. There really isn't that much detail to be seen here compared to other games being released now. This game seriously looks like an early Playstation 2 game or even a late entry into the Playstation console.

Sound : The sound is passable but not much else. The music is your generic medieval stuff that's really ambient and doesn't grab your attention nor enhance the game at all. Likewise, the sound effects are your generic sword swinging and arrow launching type sounds. That isn't necessarily bad, but these specific effects here are horridly underperformed.

Game play : The controls really need some tightening, I feel like I'm not really in control of the action. The game 's learning curve is small and easy enough. It is quite fulfilling to cut through waves and waves of bad guys as your particular hero. The character selection is very good, though I wish there were more variety character to character. Still though, there isn't anything here you haven't seen before. Even the most die hard Lord of the Rings fan would have a hard time justifying this game's quality.

Re playability : There's absolutely no replay value here. If you do manage to complete every aspect of this game, there's almost no chance you'll have the patience to do it again. The good play through and evil play through is an interesting idea, and seeing how things might have played out if Frodo was evil is an interesting one.

Overall : 4/10. A below average game. Really poor graphics, mediocre sound, mediocre game play, and an interesting story idea. Not much else.