The Lord of the Rings: Conquest

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest combines third-person action combat with elements of large-scale battle strategy and was created by Pandemic Studios, which had experience from the similarly styled Star Wars: Battlefront series. The game offers campaigns for both the forces of Good and Evil, with the latter offering an alternative view of the events of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, in which the player commands Sauron's armies and goes through the key battles from the opposite side of the front line.

At the start of each mission, the player chooses one of several combat classes — warrior, archer, mage, or sentinel — each offering a different fighting style and abilities usable on sprawling battlefields full of dozens of opponents and AI-controlled allies, with classes able to be switched as needed during the mission. The battles take place at well-known locations from the book and film source material, from Helm's Deep to Minas Tirith and Mordor, and the player can gradually move between individual fronts within them and complete tactical objectives, such as capturing strategic points or destroying enemy forces, giving the gameplay a flavor of mass battle clashes that were otherwise unusual in action games of that time. The multiplayer component then offered additional modes built around team combat between the forces of Good and Evil.

Critical reception was mixed — players praised the game for the idea of siding with evil and going through an alternate version of the story, but complaints were directed at the repetitive mission structure, the somewhat shallow combat system, and technical shortcomings. Conquest thus remains more of a curious chapter among games derived from The Lord of the Rings — ambitious in the scale of its battles and its unconventional take on the story, but not entirely polished at the core of its gameplay, so it never entered the pantheon of the best licensed games. Still, thanks to its unconventional perspective on the events of The Lord of the Rings, it retains a group of admirers to this day who remember it as an interesting curiosity among games derived from Tolkien's work.