For an LotR game, Conquest is looking rather spiffy. You get to control an Ent (prehensile trees are sooo underrated in fiction!) and if you go over to the dark side and play the Evil campaign, you get to kick Sam Gamgee's sorry butt all the way down to the depths of Khazad-dum. Wanna raze down the Shire as a Balrog with a mean flaming whip? Yeah, being evil was never this rewarding indeed.

So what's up with the Evil campaign, you ask? Well, the incentive there (aside from getting another set of PS3 Trophies along the way, of course) is that you get to somehow see what would happen if Frodo and the rest of the Fellowship succumbed to Sauron's forces. I'm not sure if this counts as Tolkien's canon, but it still sounds like a cool and plausible "what if".

Here's a dev diary with Eric Gewirts from Pandemic Studios talking about the Evil campaign in full (lots and lots of gameplay clips here!):

Pandemic Studios' Lord of the Rings: Conquest for the PS3, Xbox 360, PC, and DS will be available on January 9.

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