Game Review: LEGO Lord of the Rings

Since I’ve fin­ished play­ing the story mode por­tion of the game, this seemed like a good point for a review.

First off, this one is a no-brainer for me. I love every­thing LOTR related and I’ve enjoyed every LEGO game I’ve played. So the com­bi­na­tion pretty much can’t lose.

I played this on the Wii and clearly it was being pushed to its lim­its by this game. There were some glitches, there were a cou­ple of crashes. It’s frus­trat­ing, but for­tu­nately the reg­u­lar game save points min­i­mize that irritation.

The basic game play is sim­i­lar to most of the pre­vi­ous LEGO games, but with some refine­ments. One thing I’ve noticed in the recent releases is that they have made an effort to pro­vide a wider range of actions. That rad­i­cally increases the vari­ety of the puzzles.

In this case they heav­ily empha­size the team aspects of the game and if you’re play­ing solo you’ll reg­u­larly have to swap between char­ac­ters to achieve things. There are a cou­ple of lev­els where one player is an invis­i­ble Frodo sneak­ing around while the other char­ac­ters work on other puzzles.

The only game play that wasn’t entirely sat­is­fac­tory to me was the hand­ful of sec­tions where you are rid­ing through a bat­tle­field or run­ning away. Really all you could do in these sec­tions was move left to right and col­lect studs. Not much replay value in those bits.

There’s less LEGO silli­ness than usual unfor­tu­nately (though there are still some great sight gags). This is because the only audio they had to work with was pulled directly from the movies and that does limit them noticeably.

While the cut-scenes are effec­tively re-created, they do get quite annoy­ing since you can’t eas­ily skip them the first time. It wouldn’t be a big deal except for the ten­dency to give 2 min­utes of game­play fol­lowed by 1 minute of load­ing and then 3 min­utes of cut-scene before you get into the guts of the level.

Graph­i­cally its’ really well done. Admit­tedly it is incred­i­bly grey in later lev­els, but… have you watched the movies? There are lots of nice lit­tle touches like the exhausted ver­sions of Sam and Frodo you can pick up near the end, who flop around and can’t jump. Or the way peo­ple teeter pre­car­i­ously when bal­anc­ing on objects.

Hav­ing com­pleted story mode I still have about 2/3rds of the game to com­plete. There are lots of addi­tional char­ac­ters to buy, objects to build at the Black­smith, quests to under­take etc. Plus the fun of freeplay and try­ing lev­els using char­ac­ters they weren’t intended for.

So basi­cally, loved it. Played it far too much. Gonna keep play­ing it.

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