Lego The Lord of the Rings Review

Despite being released nine years after the final film, the memories are still strong enough to make the latest tie-in feel like a relevant entry to the series rather than a late cash-in. I’m sure the upcoming release of the first Hobbit movie has nothing to do with Traveller’s Tales and Warner Bros. Interactive waiting this long. Ok, so maybe a little.

Since the Lego series began, we’ve seen it grow in terms of production values. The graphics have been steadily improving and the recent Lego Batman 2 introduced fully voiced characters for the first time, which allowed the series to portray a proper story and a damn amusing one at that.

LOTR goes one step further by using the original voices from the movies. Along with the familiar music and nicely replicated levels, it should satisfy most fans of the films with ease. With so much authenticity though, there’s almost no room for a sense of humour, the backbone of the Lego games’ cutscenes.

The dialogue is straight-faced serious throughout and the only humorous moments are rooted in physical comedy. It feels like something of a backwards step. Let’s face it, there are plenty of laughs to be had at the movie’s expense -albeit respectfully, as per Traveller’s Tales track record. So don’t expect Sam’s mancrush on Frodo to get any airtime.

Most of the humour involves characters messing around while someone else recites lines from the movie. Frodo drops the One Ring in his brew seconds after receiving it, the Riders of Rohan’s introduction sees them doing a horse dressage circle around Aragorn and co, Gimli primes his axe like a shotgun and Boromir’s Uruk foe preps a chicken to fire from his bow. I loved seeing the Uruk-hai being born from a washing machine instead of the slimy holes in the movie too. Gollum steals the show though, despite the simple on his Lego face, TT have nailed the evil playfulness dancing around his eyes and hissing through his pointed teeth.

The template for the game remains almost the same as ever. With any changes appearing to come from a team that smashed the original template, then got scared and quickly stuck it back together to get something as close to possible as what they started with.

Everyone has a sword or equally damaging punches to take on orcs, Uruk-hai, trolls, wargs, Ring-Wraths, but no Mumakill. Only kidding, you totally get to slide down a Mumakill trunk. Can you imagine the backlash? After fending off an area’s enemies you go through your usual Lego game routine of smash everything to look for something to build to allow you to progress.

Some stages that require stealth, like evading the Black rider on the way to Bree or escaping a demented Boromir. Other stages are just filled with elements to drag them out. Take following Gollum through the marshes, every path he takes suddenly bursts into flames, requiring you to backtrack to find yet another bucket of water. Stages like this usually go on too long, which will test your patience. The big battles are handled particularly well though, the huge numbers of orcs onscreen at once as you ride into battle on horseback as Eowyn at Minas Tirith is the biggest scale of action ever seen in a Lego title and was just what the game needed at that point.

I was impressed with the way that the game handles the early breaking up of the Fellowship. At frequent intervals you’re allowed to choose which team you want to play as next, be it Aragorn’s group or Frodo and co. You must complete all the stages eventually, but it’s nice to be given some choice and not be forced into the same route as the films.

As per the Lego norm, some characters have unique skills. Hobbits and Gimli can crawl through narrow spaces, Sam starts fires and grows plants, Gollum climbs walls, Gimli smashes weak walls, Aragorn tracks trails, Legolas fires arrows and so on. Swapping between party members is still cumbersome though. Holding a button brings up a character wheel but leaves you exposed. Or you can tap it and hope you’ll swap to the person you’re pointing at – difficult when they’re clumped together. The shoulder buttons perform similarly, why you can’t just swap between them in a list order with these buttons is as beyond me as it has been for the last two games.

After playing the last two Lego titles, I decided not to waste time trying to search for the collectables during my original playthrough of the story mode. Expect most items to be unreachable until you replay a level in freeplay mode, where you can choose characters with unique skills that aren’t available first time. This saved me a lot of time and allowed me to plough through the story in about eight hours. Ok, so I got a little distracted with breaking things for coins, which once again will bring out the crack-addled magpie in all of you.

The also-shiny Mithril bricks are rare items used as currency to forge new items, which you first have to find the blueprint for. Some items feel useless, like a whistling sword, but you need most of them as they’re probably on your checklist for side-quests, more on those later. Some are useful though, for example, Mithril rope can be used by anyone in freeplay mode, instead of just Sam.

Diving straight back into the game via freeplay mode was where I expected to be truly sucked in, but the format has been changed and not for the better to be honest. Side-quests have been included with quest-givers hanging out in the hub-esque world between stages. This shrunken down version of Middle-earth gives you domain to grab extra Mithril bricks, buy characters and do fetch quests for Red Bricks, those vital bricks that unlock skills to make Platinuming the game much easier -but still reasonably challenging- by giving you coin multipliers and item-finding arrows.

Sadly, these quests involve replaying a level and trying to find items with no help at all. You need a certain character to access some areas of a stage but you only find out when you’re playing it again. If you still haven’t unlocked the right guy, you feel like you’re going insane trying to get the egg before the chicken and vice versa. On the plus side, that infuriating pause when you collect a brick (see Lego Batman 2) has been fixed.

This is the only Lego game where I struggled to build up enthusiasm to gather all the collectibles after finishing the story mode. It gets better once you have a few red bricks under your belt, but the journey there feels needlessly prolonged. However, if you enjoy the Lego games without being too bothered about collecting everything, then it’s hard not to recommend Lego The Lord of the Rings.