Lego The Lord of the Rings Review

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.