It's action-packed to say the least, but the repetitive gameplay and frustrating combat bring the experience down.
Lord of the Rings: Conquest has three different modes. The campaign mode, which basically replicas the films and also has an "evil" campaign where you control the orks and trolls; there's instant action, where you select a map and game mode and play for fun on the maps; and finally there's online multiplayer. I'll start off with the campaign(s) first. The story follows the Lord of the Rings storyline, which is far too complex so I won't bother explaining it all in one review. There are about 8 or so levels per each campaign, and each level comes after and is followed by a scene from the actual film. While these scenes are great since they're from the actual movie, they really don't help the story that much. Speaking of the story, you don't play as one particular character; instead you get to choose from five different classes, and each class has different abilities such as magic spells and turning invisible.
I would advise you to take the tutorial mode before starting the campaign. This instructs you on how to use special abilities and know the different classes. In the tutorial you're thrust into the battle in the opening of the first movie, where Sauron almost dies. What you'll immediately notice is that the scale of the battle is significantly reduced. Sure, you'll see tons of soldiers fighting endlessly in the background, but you can never really engage in them. Usually you're off cut off from the rest of the battle by a river or a line or boulders or, well, you get the idea. Most of the time there aren't too many enemies to fight, at least in the early levels. You'll be able to crush most of your enemies with a simple fire attack that uses up a bar that needs to be recharged by killing off more enemies. Sometimes, however, there are a lot of smarter enemies wearing heavy armor that can easy block and evade your attacks while unleashing a huge spinning fire attack at you. The only way to really take these guys down is by using your fire attack. There isn't an auto-targeting system, so you'll often be hitting the tougher enemy when you really meant attack another enemy to recharge your bar for a fire attack. Oh yeah, you get knocked down pretty easily in this game, and it can take a while to get back up. What surprises me is how long it takes to kill the armored enemies and how short it takes to kill a troll or an oliphaunt (I think that's what you call it).
All you have to do is walk behind them and press RB and then press either X,Y,B or A and than you kill him instantly. The trolls, despite how easy in theory it is to kill them, can be quite the nuisance. If they manage to grab you while you're distracted by other enemies, it's basically an instant kill, even though it takes a while for them to throw you somewhere, and that's what kills you. This can be annoying when you're trying to control an area and you're being overrun and you can't do anything about it because the stupid troll didn't throw you against something. Speaking of controlling areas, that's what you'll mainly be doing throughout the entire campaign. The objectives range from kill the two enemies with the torches or kill two oliphaunts or kill two trolls. As you can imagine, these get really repetitive really quickly. Other times you have to capture a control point and then hold it for 2 or 3 minutes while trolls and other enemies try to take it over. Unfortunately, when there are around 30 or so enemies in a small space, chances are you're gonna die. When you die, you can choose which control point to spawn at. You only start off with a few lives, and trust me, they go by pretty quickly. The only way to gain more lives is by completing objectives. Once you get towards the end of the level, there's usually some sort of boss character you'll have to defeat to beat the level. The problem isn't necessarily killing them--it's that if you die, it's back to square one, meaning you have to start from the beginning of the whole level again. There are no mid-level checkpoints or any way to save in mid-level. That's probably the worst problem with the game. Oh yeah, there is co-op, too, but I don't really have any friends that play this game so I can't comment on that.
I can sum all the other aspects of this game up in one more paragraph. Once you beat the first campaign, you can play as the bad side. This basically acts as the same campaign as the first. There's also instant action to play if you really want to, but since there aren't any achievements to unlock from it, there's really not much of a point in playing it. You basically select which map and game mode to play, choose a side, and then play to 50 if it's team deathmatch or get the most points in capturing a control point in the mode conquest. Finally I'll talk about online multiplayer. First off, no one really plays online so even if you find a match, there probably won't be too many people in it. Anyway, you can choose ranked or unranked (I would choose ranked because I'd assume more people would play it) and you randomly join a game. Multiplayer seems a lot like instant action with real players except for one thing: a lot of people play as a scout. In case I didn't mention it before, a scout can turn invisible and instant kill you by pressing RB when he's behind you. This makes pretty much any match you play in unfair. Also, even if everyone in the whole game plays as a scout, which would make it even, why would you attempt to fight people you can't even see? You might as well just move around and press RB if that happens. So, overall, multiplayer is trash. The graphics in the game are about average. The animations for your character look stiff and terrible, and the same can be said when you're fighting someone. There is nothing good about the graphics, except for the art design, which copies the Lord of the Rings. The audio isn't much better. Sure, the soundtrack's fine, along with the in-game sound, but what about the voice acting? It's alright when clips from the movie are being played, but when you're playing the game there's a narrator who randomly shouts out the objective. Believe me, the guy's voice sounds god awful. Overall, Lord of the Rings: Conquest had potential but didn't really cut it. It's worth a rent by an casual fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but for anyone else, stay away. I guess we'll just have to wait for Star Wars Battlefront 3.