Being one of the world’s best loved franchises, Lord of the Rings has been made in to quite a few different games on various formats, each with varying degree’s of success.  Will we ever get bored of the massive world J.R.R. Tolkein created? EA Games don’t seem to think so and to be honest, I don’t either. 

The news was leaked recently that Lord of the Rings: Conquest is set to be the latest installment of the fantasy series. The game is being developed by Pandemic for Nintendo DS and various other formats.  

An action-based game, Pandemic promise us that you can play though each of the games epic battles in the series as the good guys or more excitingly as the forces of evil.  

Being that this is the first time in a LOTR game that you can play as a cave troll, the Balrog or if your feeling particularly evil – the Dark Lord Sauron himself, net nerds (like myself) will be jumping up and down in anticipation at the thought of burning down a hobbit village with a horde of Ura-Kai.   

With Pandemic developing the game we can be assured that the license is in safe hands. Star Wars Battlefield 2, Full spectrum Warrior ad Mercenaries are some of the title’s they’ve worked on in the past. 

Gameplay details have not been released but (a clearly excited) Josh Resnick, Pandemic’s co-founder and general manager said,  

“We’ll freely admit that we’re rabid fans of The Lord of the Rings fantasy. 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.” 

How the game will look and work on the DS is a mystery, but it’s on my shopping list already. Other than this, details are scarce sadly, and the only screen shots are of the Xbox 360 version. 

Lord of the Rings: Conquest will be released on DS (as well as PS3, Xbox 360 and PC), during the autumn this year.