LEGO The Lord of the Rings

The Good
Unlike previous movie-based Lego games I've played (which includes Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean), this is the first Lego game that has actual voice-acting for the characters. While occasional exhaling of vowels like in previous games is still present, all of the cutscenes feature voice-acting and all the major characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and the Hobbits sounds just as they do in the movie. I didn't think movie-based Lego games are such major projects that they would use the actual actors from The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, but until I checked the actual credits I was certain they did. However they managed to pick the right actors to make them sound as original, it's really an impressive thing.

For the first time, this game features a rather open world for exploring, and while you can follow the transparent blue lego markers to progress the main story, the game features a rather huge map which can be explored at random with lots of side-quests, unlockables and treasures to be found. That alone has so much content it can extend the main storyline by a few times in length.

The battles, although lego-style, look pretty huge with lots of units on the screen and dynamic battlefields, and boss battles are inventive but easy to win nonetheless. The free camera now lets you rotate around the larger areas which was not available in past movie-based Lego games as far as I can recall, so you can see some nice landscapes in the distance, even though they are rather blurred due to PS3's limitations and not wanting to risk of losing the fluid gameplay or adequate framerate. The music too is very down to original and one can immediately notice the Hobbit village theme or some other memorable tracks from the game.

The Bad
The game can be buggy which prevents you to proceed. For example, you have to push the lego block down the ledge but it ends up floating on the way down and you cannot do anything but quit the current gameplay and try again. Unlike Lego Pirates of the Caribbean where a graphical bug during final boss battle always froze the game which stopped me from ever finishing it, at least this bug fixes itself after several tries, but still, such things during the main story should have been vetted better. Seems like the more complex Lego games become, the more bugs they feature.

While basic gameplay is pretty much unchanged, the character switching process really requires some tweaking. Just pressing the triangle switches to a character you are pointing toward, or at least tries, it may take several attempts to switch to a wanted characters, and sometimes it is not even doable so you have to do it manually. Manual switch, on the other hand, doesn't pause the game, so you often die in the process. While dying has never been a big deal in these Lego games as you respawn seconds later, it's still not something the player wants to encounter every now and then.

The Bottom Line
I am not a fan of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and unlike other movie-based Lego games I got, this was kind of an out of a blue decision. It is fun to see how the Lego version of the movies you've seen is following the story. If, however, I were a fan of Tolkien's world, then this would definitely be a worth title to play, even though it is not as serious as the story tries to be. Gags, puns and occasional jests are still there, and while they're nothing new in comparison to previous Lego games, they tend to remind you that you're playing Lego version of the story and not some hack-and-slash mature rated game as it would most likely otherwise be rated.

Playing with a friend, this may probably seem more fun and all those bonus levels and missions might give you many additional hours of gameplay. If you're only in for the main story as I was, it will still give you a lot of eye-candy exotic locations which you most probably remember from the movie, all the characters and key moments from the trilogy where you can play them yourself, if only in a comedic sort of way.