Reviews - Khoran_Gutsplitter

LotR: Conquest is a flawed but fun game. It is a battlefront 2 style game set in the world of Middle-Earth with a higher focus on close combat.

Campaign is solid especially if playing it for the first time, and the story it tells (War of the Ring specifically) and various locations you fight over will be familiar to any who watched Peter Jackson's LotR film trilogy. The levels get more difficult as you progress, and can prove to be quite the challenge. Only drawback is that its very linear and the only reason one would replay it is to either experience it again after laying off the game for years or try beating it on a higher difficulty, but even then there's no real award for doing it.

Gameplay is flawed and repetitive, but still weirdly fun and addicting. You need to do a lot of button mashing here in order to play competently and be prepared to be turned into combo food as you can get juggled to hell if you're not careful, and the mage class is a tad too powerful compared to the others. Scout class can insta-kill pretty much all enemies, even the 9ft tall Sauron which looks ridiculous. Many of the animations are also just subpar.

On the bright side being able to chain together different powerful combos as a warrior or scout class, blasting enemies off cliffs with a mage class shockwave/you shall not pass ability, getting headshots with a archer, throwing grabbed enemies like a ragdoll as a troll/ent, or whenever you get the chance to take control of a hero/villain (Including Sauron himself) or even a troll/ent/oliphaunt (playable only on specific maps) is always fun and satisfying. On some maps you can also mount horses or wargs to quickly get from one area to another and even trample enemies at full speed!

Graphics are dated as many have pointed out, you can tell it's from a different era, it has not held up particularly well. But still there's some nice details here and there (especially in the background of some campaign levels), and "decent enough" for what it is.

Dialogue is across the board bad to awful, and the in-game announcer is infamously annoying. The only good performance you'll find here is Hugo Weaving. He narrates the game's story, both the War of the Ring (Good Side) and Rise of Sauron (Evil Side).

Soundtrack is easily a 10/10 as many of the tracks are taken straight from the movies and god is it epic to listen to, especially as you slaughter hordes of Orcs as someone like Aragorn, it really makes the game that much better.

There's some deviations from the lore here too, mostly bad. Notably With the fact that there are hundreds of mages walking about (when there's only strictly 5 in the lore, who are all angelic Maias who have taken physical forms), Wormtongue taking a part in the battle of Isengard, and Sauron somehow resurrecting a slain Balrog. Witch-king i could see, but a balrog...idk about that.

TL;DR Overall for me it's a slightly above average game as i enjoyed it more than i maybe should have. There's a lot of fun to be had here, but one can't look past all the flaws it has.

This is undoubtedly an excellent mod! Impressive voice acting, perfectly hand-crafted models and custom animations, lots of unit variety (you can pick from 7 different relic units!) and the ability to recruit the Praetorian of Terra himself!

The Imperial Fists are not my favorite chapter, that goes to the Iron hands, but this is definitely a mod that's worth checking out (unless you're a die hard Iron Warriors fan, you can bugger off.) I guarantee you won't regret the experience.

Now i do have a couple of suggestions for the team to consider which i feel would be welcome additions.

The Imperial Fists Librarian (apart from voice acting and one unique ability which acts like smite) isn't much different from vanilla. He could definitely use a few more abilities especially when you consider the fact that IF librarians has access to six unique psychic powers only available to them. Let's give the Salamanders librarian a run for his money! Take Stonebane for example which summons a literal etheric hammer in the user's grip which can crush just about anything or The Golden Son which transforms the librarian into a radiant figure infused with the power and nobility of Rogal Dorn! Sounds like pure awesomeness to me and would love to see these abilities in game. Not entirely necessary though. :p

There is one asset that's kind of missing from being able to fully fortify my base and that is a void shield generator. It would basically act the same as the Tau shield generator in UA, increasing ranged resistance and making units immune to knockback, but at the cost of making units more vulnerable to melee damage. It would definitely be a tier four structure.

Now i want to talk a little about balance.

I haven't played enough matches to state things with complete accuracy but it seems like at the moment there are very few factions that can stand toe to toe with the Imperial Fists, especially late-game. Only the Emperor's Children and Daemonhunters (from what i've played) feels like a solid challenge for me to play against. Also they can apparently field "three" relic units at once at the movement? That feels a bit excessive imo.

But apart from that, everything else is...perfection. Kekoulis you have blown it out of the park once again!

This is hands down one of the best race mods i've ever gotten to experience. The Emperor's Children are perfectly represented. Sonic weapons almost everywhere, perverse voice lines, sexy cultists/daemons, corrupted sisters and even Fulgrim himself! This has further solidified that Kekoulis is the most talented modder in the DoW 1 community. If it were not for him this mod wouldn't be as amazing as it is. Everyone should definitely give this mod a try, even if you prefer Khorne over Slaanesh.

A perfect balance between Elite and Vengeance of the blood ravens. Very fun and reasonably balanced while managing to stay fairly true to the fluff. The creator of the mod is quite nice and the Tau really play like they should now.

There's still some bugs and balance issues across the board, but not anything major from what i've noticed.

All in all this mod has a lot of potential and it's already pretty good. Definitely recommend giving it a try.