Review: Lego Lord of the Rings
By Sean Booker
November 25, 2012 - 16:29
Studios: Traveller's Tales
Rating: E10 (Everyone 10 and Up)
Genre: Action Adventure
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Nintendo Wii
Players: 1-2 (local co-op)
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Lego Lord of the Rings continues the recent trend of adding dialogue to the Lego branded games and though it does capture the look and feel of the movie trilogy quite well, the game remains far too easy and uninteresting. Most of the fun you’ll have with Lego LotR is when simply goofing around in the numerous environments and trying to unlock and find all the hidden collectables. However, when progressing through the main campaign, you’ll find yourself quickly bored with the repeating puzzles, boring bosses and overall tedious gameplay mechanics.
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The game easily captures the aesthetic of the three movies with the added charm of almost everything being made out of Lego blocks. You’ll play through all three of the Lord of the Rings movies and each are separated out from one another.There are a number of fun additional jokes that are very welcomed. These can range from characters’ swords being turned into bananas or enemies using brooms as arrows. Some of the jokes are even specific to how Lego blocks are formatted and lead to some nicely written gags. With this great look and feel it was also nice to see exact dialogue from the films in there in order to really capture the spirit of the trilogy.
Lego Lord of the Rings’s best strength is how expansive of a world it sets up for you. Every area you encounter will need to be played through numerous times with several different characters in order to fully complete. And there are dozens upon dozens of unlockable characters, costumes and weapons to play around with. You can even play through the game in co-op with one other person. A good addition but it would have been nice to see online co-op be an option. This definitely adds a good level of replay value to the game but is unlocked only by muscling through the story mode.
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The biggest problem with Lego LotR is that the majority of what you’ll need to do gets incredibly repetitive and eventually boring. Every level will be set up for you to basically break every constructed object apart, build it into something else, rinse and repeat. For example, if you find a ledge you can’t climb up to, you will probably end up having to break any box or bush nearby to use the pieces to build a ladder. This gets old very fast.
Adding to the repetition is the ease of each puzzle and every section of combat. When you’re not building ladders and bridges, you’ll be fighting incredibly weak enemies or taking on one of the numerous boss monsters seen throughout the movies. The bosses take longer to kill but that’s mainly due to having to wait for specific animations and openings to occur. Almost every boss will have some form of semi-lock-on attack that it easy to avoid and after a minute or two they’ll always get their weapon stuck in the ground or find some other reason to stand still while you deliver a devastating blow. This turns every fight into one eye-rolling section after another. It’s depressing to see no real divergence from this strict formula and it makes the game lose a lot of charm.
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Apart from the primary campaign you’ll also have a good deal of side quests you can go on. More of these will unlock as you progress through the story and these can range from having to search for a certain number of objects to finding lost characters. And a lot of the items you’ll receive or find throughout the game can be brought to a blacksmith to be crafted into stronger weapons and other abilities. Finishing the campaign and only delving into this extra content a little had my completion total at around 25%.
There are a lot of stuff you can do and explore in Lego Lord of the Rings but it is really just too bad that the majority of it won’t be found in the main campaign. You’re going to find that most of the fun will be had when playing with a friend and just searching for collectables. And the game allows for this easily by having a huge amount of content for you to explore. There’s a fun time to be had with Lego Lord of the Rings but you’ll have to muscle through the lackluster story mode in order to get at it.
Rating: 6/10
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Review: Lego Lord of the Rings