LEGO Lord of the Rings Review (360)

Should you not have heard of the LEGO video games, the concept is thus: a successful movie franchise is taken and re-created with pretty much LEGO everything. Broadly aimed at children, though widely enjoyed by adults; this flavour of entertainment has already rehashed Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Harry Potter. This time around it’s hobbits, wizards and elves that take centre stage for their blocky makeover in LEGO Lord of the Rings.

There’s a huge selection of characters available to play. In the main campaign alone, you’d probably expect to see: Frodo, Legolas et al but there’s also appearances from Boromir, Smeagol and the Treants.

Each character has either a unique ability or access to a subset of abilities allowing you to chain character swapping together to solve puzzles. These can involve shooting targets (Legolas), smashing blocks (Gimli) or getting through tiny spaces (all small characters). Other characters are unlocked as you complete stages and should you want to go back in free-play you’ll be able to buy these guys to join in on your travelling.

Most of the famous set-pieces from the films are included throughout the course of the game, and watching these will keep you going through the more tedious sections as they’re offered up with the tongue-in-cheek humour expected from this series. If I’m honest though, towards the final third of the game they may be the *only* things keeping you engaged. Even allowing for the fact the game is designed for children there still isn’t enough of a challenge and after a while I did start to wonder if it was all just a little bit insulting for the old grey cells.

When I say “challenge”, I of course mean “interesting puzzling gameplay” not “OHMYGODAGAIN?!” I think TT Games may have become a little confused somewhere along the way and several hours in I was more than pissed off with the incredibly cyclical formula. Run around a bit smashing things, puzzle that needs some dynamic character swapping, smashing things, smashing things, character swapping, smashsmashsmash, BOSS FIGHT (involving dynamic character swapping, smashing things, pressing everything because you have no idea what to do, smashing things). Rinse and repeat.

There is of course, nothing wrong with that – sometimes all I want from a game is some twinkly positive feedback to idle away my hours – but an epic, sweeping homage to the great adventure this is not. TT Games do try to make up for the lack of variety with an enormous amount of quantity and STUFF!

For the obsessive collector in most of us there’s going to be hours and hours of time spent, guides to be read and achievements to be gained. Replay value is immense here with every area opened by completing the single-player campaign, allowing you to go back with a party of your choice to solve all the puzzles previously unachievable. Treasure chests, red bricks, mithril blocks, blacksmith recipes, unlockable characters… it’s all there and there’s lots.

Graphically it’s very, very pretty with scenery being more awe-inspiring and less made out of blocks than I’ve seen in previous games. There’s no jarring effect, as I thought there might be, between the LEGO foreground and the more photo-realistic backgrounds. There’s little disconnect from bashing blocky trees and rocks to bits whilst gazing at a sweeping panorama of mountains. I believe this is also the first of these games to use music and vocals straight from the films themselves. This adds more than you’d think to the experience (as long as you’ve watched the trilogy) as you automatically feed the ambience and emotions from those highly charged moments into the gameplay on the screen. There was no dwarf tossing mentioned; that made me sad.

Because this game is a lot of fun on the surface, the temptation is for me to forgive the seriously lackluster mechanics and just tell you to BUYBUYBUY but it’s just not worth paying full price on this one. At least not if you intend to complete the story, as the fun just dissipates too rapidly to keep you interested and it’ll end up back on your pile of shame. Wait for a sale, snap it up and enjoy your good value romp through Middle Earth.

Lego Lord of the Rings is out now on Xbox 360, PS3, 3DS, Wii and PS Vita.

More Screenshots