It's very easy to see what the developers of Lord of the Rings: Conquest were aiming for. The grand scope and scale of the battles in the book and film series seem to beg for some kind of interactive iteration, especially a multiplayer one that can populate the famous battlefields of Middle Earth with live players swinging their swords and loosing flight after flight of arrows.
But the reality of that kind of setting, and it's implantation in Conquest, leaves a lot to be desired. The game features both a single-player campaign and an online multiplayer mode.
The former features the usual tutorial level (set during the Last Alliance's siege of Barad Dûr, for those in the LotR know), and then progresses into a series of battles that recreate - very loosely - the War of the Ring. Complete this campaign, and you unlock the chance to play on the side of Evil in a campaign that posits what might happen if Frodo's quest fails and armies of Mordor flood out across Middle Earth - and yes, it ends with very bad things happening to the Shire. Those poor Hobbits.
The multiplayer portion of the game offers much the same maps from the single player game, but instead of populating them with barely competent AI-driven allies and enemies, you get live opponents.
The various maps are actually quite well-realised, offering a wonderful Middle Earth look and feel - especially the Minas Tirith ones - and a lot of care has been taken to make the various models and musical flourishes match with the film. However, where the game falls down is in the integration of an essentially Battlefield style class and objective system with the setting.
The classes are the same for both evil and good, and are broken down into the Warrior, a sword-wielding melee specialist, the Scout, a close-in damage dealer and stealth charater, the self explanatory Archer, and the out-of-left-field and has-no-business-existing-in-such-numbers Wizard.
They are reasonably well balanced, true, and the play-off between sneaking Scouts and entrenched Archers means Warriors aren't nearly in as much trouble as you might expect on open battlefields.
But the Wizard, tossing fireballs and lightning and healing nearby troops, seems to spit in the eye of everything that makes Lord of the Rings, well, Lord of the Rings. It may be nit-picking to say this, but it simply doesn't match the background of the books or the movies; it's like playing a World War 2 strategy game and finding aliens in your build tree.
What's worse, the maps have been rather small - so as to facilitate easy access for melee classes - and this means that once a side starts dominating a map (which will also unlock special playable characters, like Aragorn for the good guys, and the Balrog for evil), that domination gets even harder to fight against.
In other words, it just stops being fun and starts being more about how many elves you can step on.
If this had been published as a generic fantasy title - say, Battlefield: Generic Fantasy World - it would have probably been not half bad. But trying to hit two franchises with one stone has simply resulted in a miss for all concerned.
For: Great audio; some actors from film in voice roles, plenty of maps.
Against: Integration of setting and gameplay; wizards, repetitive voice work in some sequences.