Lord Of The Rings: Conquest

Lord Of The Rings: Conquest is a Battlefield/front type game set in the Tolkien universe currently under development by Pandemic Studios. “Our experience creating massive, rich, action-packed games means that The Lord of the Rings: Conquest will give fans exactly what they want: full control of the blade, bow and magic to fight its epic battles any way they want – even if they choose to play from the evil side,” said Pandemic's Josh Resnick. And who wouldn't play as a orck (yes, I'm going with a franchise-neutral spelling from now on), that's what I want to know. Anyway, more details and screens after the jump.

Pandemic, who are also hard at work on the excellent-looking Mercenaries 2, will be in charge of turning LOTR into a multiplayer battle game, and therefore face the eternal conundrum of how to avoid making melee combat work properly.

“Our Pandemic Studios creative teams have years of expertise bringing giant battlefields to life,” says Andrew Goldman, Pandemic Studios co-founder and general manager. “We’ve always wanted to harness our experience in a fantasy universe with warriors, archers, mages and castle sieges. Of course, there is truly no better fantasy world to recreate than the enormity of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ realm.”

I'm a bit sceptical about how good this can be: the Battlefront games always underwhelmed me, and I can't really see the game managing to deliver more than rough skirmishes - the thunderous collision of ranks of fantasy soldiers seen in the movies is clearly right out. Middle Earth: Total War please, Gaming Overlords.

And some more images, click for the full beast.