Lego Lord of the Rings

My opinion would have most likely been different regarding this game if it had been my first Lego videogame. Unfortunately for it, it wasn't and as a result my expectations were already set by the Lego Marvel Superheroes game.

Much like all the other Lego games, due to legal copy rights and other silly things like that, the game was developed by Traveller's Tales and published by Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment. It a little older having come out in 2012, and is available to play on multiple platforms (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS Vita, Nintendo  DS and 3DS as well as all PC operating systems), its age is starting to show, but I only recently got around to playing it on my PC through Steam.

I'm not entirely sure what to call the Lego Lord of the Rings game, its a bit of a platformers, a bit of an action adventure but nothing really stands out since at the end of the its a simple game designed mainly to appeal to children. But, from what I read this game seems to have set the precedent that Lego games that came after it now follow. That precedent being that certain characters are given a unique skill that allows them to get through specific obstacles set in the level, which in turn forces the player to have to rotate between the characters at their disposal to actually get through the level. There is a fairly wide selection of characters, around the eighty mark I think. There is obviously duplication of skills so to a large extent you will see yourself playing with the same ones for the most part. Additionally the game allows you to craft items that allows any of your characters to pull off things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do normally, such as starting a fire which is only an ability that Sam can do by default so this again kind of does not incentivize you to play around with different characters.

I don't know why, but for some reason I really didn't find the audio or graphical quality of the game that impressive. Well, maybe more so for the audio since I don't know why I felt that they could easily just lift the dialogue right out of scenes from the movies and that should have resulted in a fairly fine quality. Unfortunately, for whatever reason the sound in the game is quite grainy and instead of being creative with the audio lifting the same lines are used over and over again even if the context is incorrect making me just feel weird. On the graphics side the game was filled with a bunch of bugs that were really frustrating. The first group of bugs were those around the random invisible walls that are placed in the paths of high leaps, there are numerous time I would try to jump from one stand to another only to hit a random wall and have to do it all over again, I was actually forced to go around the problem by skipping some of the jump points. The second group are those regarding clipping and getting stuck in terrain, while I only got stuck a few time, clipping and getting thrown off the map happened constantly, the biggest example of this would be when I was playing as Treebread and I was just flung into the black oblivion above the map and just started falling towards the ground again. The third batch would simply be the grainy quality of the game as well, it just wasn't as clean the newer Lego games, but that might not be a fair attack on the game since it did come out in 2012.

I mostly play these Lego games as a pallet cleaner between one major gaming experience to the next, but I think maybe I should find something else to do that for me moving forward. While I do understand that Lego LotR like its counterparts is a children's game, I think I might have gone a bit overboard by buying three of these during the last summer sale. Lego LotR left a particularly bad taste in my mouth compared to Lego Marvel Superheroes since it was full of so many graphical and audio bugs, it just didn't feel as clean of a product. Now, while alone I think the games are fine, I would recommend just sticking to the newest Lego game that comes out as they are all just carbon copies of one another with a different skin. Even if you are a big fan of LotR, the "humor" adding by a Lego game is quite minimal so I wouldn't really recommend that you get this game unless you have a kid who is really into LotR, this is a definite do not buy due to its age and lack of finishing on a audio and graphical level.