2009 has arrived and it is time to move away from the amazing gaming year of 2008 and move on to see what this new year has in store for us. EA has come out with a huge start in releasing a demo for Lord of the Rings: Conquest on Xbox Live. I of course took up the opportunity to check out the demo right away and I have to say I really had mixed feelings.

Like any preview I want to mention this is not the final game nor the final code so we can expect some things to be fixed if not all but what I will be discussing or more general feelings and so that may not always be applicable anyways. Regardless I started up by going through the lengthy twenty minute tutorial which has you play as the Warrior, Archer, Scout, Mage and a Hero. The tutorial gives you a really solid foundation of what your going to get from this game. At first glance it is a hack and slash button masher but the more you get into this game it is actually surprisingly more then just that.

I am going to spare everyone the agony of all of the comparisons made of LOTR: Conquest and past Pandemic Titles. I understand the merit of these comparisons but I will spare everyone they are tired. What struck me about Conquest before playing this demo was that it seemed epic, the experience just looked truly remarkable. Now that I got into it the single player feels a bit flat. Now obviously I just went through the tutorial but nothing really popped on screen it felt all a bit lackluster.

This is a multiplayer demo so of course I took it online. The experience online seemed a lot more cohesive then did the tutorial portion of the demo. The action online was fierce, competitive and a lot of the time tended to be more team based then many first person shooters. I was surprised to find that players were actually using there different classes of characters appropriately which could make for some pretty exciting matches online when the full game comes out.

One of the big reasons why this game didn’t pop for me was the visuals. Now I will throw up a disclaimer this is not the final version so the full version may look better. However if the game does stay close to what we see on the demo then I do fear that the game just isn’t going to be as rich and engaging to the user. I just didn’t yet feel like I was in a LOTR universe but rather a lightly stylized fantasy environment.

Whatever the future holds for the upcoming release of Lord of the Rings: Conquest I can tell you one thing this is not going to be a bad game, that much is for sure. How good will it be is the true question.