Oh, and the Mage can also heal himself and all of the good guys close to him. The four character classes in the game are so terribly unbalanced as to be rendered nearly irrelevant the Warrior is almost useless, only being capable of short attacks (and if you think that the axe counts as a ranged attack, you’re nuts), when compared with, say, the Mage, who has a long-range attack that also happens to be a one-hit kill in all but the most extreme cases. The actual gameplay, on the other hand, is a problem. Hugo Weaving even narrates these bits, and Hugo Weaving is three shades of awesome, so the game’s got that going for it. There’s lots of well-designed scenery (even if the color palette seems a bit limited), and the scenes from the movies are expertly manipulated to serve the needs of the narrative, particularly when the narrative takes a turn for the worse and we’re asked to inhabit the shoes of Sauron’s minions. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Pandemic Studios has experience with this particular brand of hack ‘n slash in the form of the well-received Star Wars: Battlefront series, it feels in so many ways like a poorly-thought out genre exercise in service of a fantastic license. If this was the only problem with Lord of the Rings: Conquest, it would probably be far more tolerable. The state of mild dementia that you’re reduced to because of the constant yelling is enough to convince anyone that maybe such wishes will come true. You are literally motivated by the thought that maybe the next set of messages will be a little quieter, maybe the next command a bit more creative than the one before.
The voiceovers aren’t even that creative - there are maybe four different messages for each goal that get looped until you finally succeed. “PROCEED TO THE RALLY POINT!” “PROTECT THE HOBBIT!” “DESTROY THE TOWERS!” Over, and over, and over, and not just when you’re first hearing about a new goal, but twice, three times, as many times as it takes to “motivate” you to complete every single goal in the entire game. It’s someone with a loud voice who spends the entire time YELLING at you, telling you exactly what objective you’re not doing. The voiceover is done by…well, I think it’s a random voice actor playing Aragorn, but that much isn’t entirely clear. The voiceover in the Good campaign is the worst of it, an issue made even more problematic by the fact that you can’t actually play the Evil campaign until you’ve made it through the Good missions. This is the single most immediate problem of Lord of the Rings: Conquest: the sound design more specifically, the voiceovers that utterly dominate the single-player campaign. For the most part, though, developers would prefer that the sound of a game fades into the background for evaluative purposes if it’s not being noticed, generally it’s because the sound fits the aesthetic and the mood of the rest of the game, and can be considered a success. The music of Halo is all but iconic at this point (if not as immediately recognizable as the 8-bit anthems of yesteryear), and the voice acting of the two most recent Call of Duty games stands out as some of the best dramatic reading that gaming has to offer. Games like Flower, Art Style: Orbient, and Everyday Shooter are noticeably enhanced by their use of musical elements as part of the gameplay, but there’s little doubt that those would be solid games even without the hints of emergent music. The sound design of a video game isn’t something that’s addressed all that often, or in too much depth, when evaluating the relative merits of that game. Why is he YELLING at me? For the love of God, can someone please make him stop YELLING at me?