The Lord of the Rings is the perfect game to get the Lego treatment, and now that the Lego games have ventured into an open world territory, it has never made more sense do it. Lego Lord of The Rings covers all 3 films, from the start at The Shire, all the way to Mount Doom, if you know the films and the books; you already know the story line. And if you have played previous Lego games such as Star Wars and Batman, you know what sort of experience you are in for.
For those that are new to the Lego games, I’ll try to summarise what to expect. A familiar franchise plunged into a Lego world. Now, some of the environments aren’t exactly Lego, for example, water looks like water, and a lot of the environments haven’t been made into Lego pieces. But the characters – from the heroes to the villains, and everything that you can interact with is made out of Lego pieces. It is genuinely quite impressive. And no other game can incorporate the Lego humour. And any age can appreciate the effort that has gone in to sustain the upbeat nature of Lego games gone by in The Lord of the Rings. From enemies using Bananas as arrow (during one specific cutscene), Sam having a teddy to cuddle during the cold nights in the mountains with Frodo, Merry and Pippin using ‘Mr Potato Head’ style disguises and Lego surfboards in the Water with the Nazgul. It’s all been included to make this an entertaining game that stays true to the story, but makes it much more child friendly, and amusing for adults too.
The controls are simple, X is for attack, A allows you to roll or jump. B interacts with the environment, or if held down you can swap items, and Y switches between characters. Talking about characters there are a whole plethora of them available. Some of which are unlocked through just playing through the game, other you need to purchase through using collectable Lego studs which pour out of everything destructible. Collectable are present throughout, and vary from blueprints to create new items, to different Lego blocks to pay to create said items. You will need to play through the game more than once in order to get 100%. Some collectables need certain character to collect, for example, Gimli can smash certain parts of the environment. Others will need the aforementioned items that you need to create. A pair of Mithril boxing gloves (which are equippable to any character) are needed to be able to pull glowing golden handles scattered about the world.
As an open world adventure, the areas that are open world aren’t as big as the map makes them out. It will take a long time to go around everywhere though and find everything. There are optional side quests included which means there are hours to be spent exploring Middle Earth. And the main quest levels, which break off from the main Middle Earth area, force you to use each character by incorporating different abilities in order to complete the goal. You may need to use Legolas to shoot arrows at a target while quickly swapping to Aragorn to throw Gimli to attack a certain point of the enemy. And while the standard combat gets fairly dull, it’s rare that there will be long periods of smashing the X button, as its split up nicely with needing to go about defeating the larger enemies in different ways.
There are small puzzles littered from start to finish, which require some thought as to how to achieve the goal. You may be required to push a large item off a cliff to create a passage to the next area. But to do that you need to fix the path in which the item needs to travel. To do that you need to destroy Lego in the area to find bits to assemble to fix the path. Or you can use Gandalf’s magic to put together different shaped blocks to gain access to a higher level to find the last treasure chest in an area.
Graphically the game works well. The cartoon style obviously suits Lego to a tee. And being able to visualise how the Lego characters would look in real life in comparison to their in game counterparts it a great achievement. You could really see the in game characters appear in a toy shop, and wouldn’t look out of place next to the other range of Lego toys. The voice acting has been taken straight from the films. It’s great to see the licence being used to full effect, and it’s fairly amusing seeing famous lines from the films coming out of a Lego face.
In all, Lego Lord of the Rings is a great introduction to open world games for a younger generation. And it is also a child friendly fun take on The Lord of the Ring universe. If you’re no keen on letting your children watch the films, or read the books, this is a great take on one of the most famous film and book series of all time. There is plenty here for them to get stuck into, and would keep them entertained for hours. For me, there isn’t enough here to keep me hooked more than an hour or so at a time, but I really can appreciate the great work done here. As a kids game this is excellent, for adults however this will more than likely only take up a couple of hours in between other games in your collection. I have enjoyed Lego Lord of the Rings, but only in short bursts.
