Game Description: Based on The Lord of the Rings motion
picture trilogy, LEGO The Lord of the Rings follows the original
storylines of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return
of the King, taking players through the epic story events reimagined
with the humor and endless variety of LEGO play.
LEGO Lord of the Rings takes the small
improvements made in recent LEGO titles and implements them in a major
way. It isn’t an open world title like LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes
was, but it is the largest non-open world LEGO game to date.
Environments seem bigger, there’s more space to them, which allows for
more complicated puzzles and platforming.
Even as LEGOlas, platforming struggles.
This does good things in terms of story telling and visuals, but it
ends up hindering the platforming, one of the strongest areas of the
LEGO series in the past. It’s too easy to get caught up trying to make
the same jump a dozen times because it can be hard to judge how far you
need to jump. Even if you do manage to judge the distance correctly,
it’s all to easy to slide off the edge anyway. It’s extremely
frustrating and weird when the platforming has been so great in past
titles.
The formula remains pretty similar to past titles, progressing you
through the story one mission at a time, while also giving you the
option to return to a hub world –Middle Earth in this case– to run
around. There isn’t much to do in Middle Earth, though there really
hasn’t even been too much stuff in the hub worlds, so I didn’t find much
of a compelling reason to explore, only ever backing out that far
between play sessions.
If you have a favorite moment from one of the three films, you’re
bound to see it show up in LEGO Lord of the Rings as the story that the
game follows is nearly identical to the films, at least for most of the
major moments. This means that the game is really well paced too. There
weren’t any standout moments that felt like they went on for too long,
it all felt just right. If anything, the numerous long and unskippable
cutscenes were the only thing to negatively impact the flow of gameplay.
They’re good for a few laughs, but if you’ve seen the films in recent
years, they come off a bit unnecessary.
Choreographed Minifig Combat
Perhaps the biggest improvement in LEGO Lord of the Rings over past
LEGO titles is the higher level of animation in combat. Despite the
fluidity of combat in past games, it always felt like your MiniFig was
swinging their weapon like an overdramatic play-actor trying to gain the
attention of a talent scout. It all felt a bit unnecessarily slow, but
that isn’t an issue in LEGO LotR.
Everything still controls the same, but instead of a simple swing of
the sword, your character engages in a quick combat sequence that’s so
smooth it almost looks choreographed. It all takes place very quickly
though, so it doesn’t ever feel like you’re not in control of the
character. This is best seen in action when you have a character like
Legolas who uses a Bow for ranged combat and daggers for close-quarters
combat. He quickly switches between the two as needed in a fluid way
that moves the combat along.
Couch Co-op At its Best
As with all LEGO games, LEGO Lord of the Rings is at its best when
played cooperatively with a buddy. There’s still drop-in/drop-out coop,
which is just as flawless as ever, though it’s still quite distracting
to have the constant flashing reminder at the top of the screen to have a
friend join in. There’s a good amount of puzzles that require
near-direct control of two different characters, so it can take some
careful maneuvering if you’re trying to quickly swap between characters.
AI has never been great in past LEGO games, but it seems to have
improved in LEGO Lord of the Rings. While they won’t be helping you
solve any puzzles, they’re able to navigate obstacles without much
trouble for the most part. There’s the occasional moment where they
might get stuck in a fall, but that can usually be solved by switching
to them and moving from the danger zone. It wasn’t a regular occurrence
though, which is somewhat surprising as things can get pretty cramped
during moments when you have almost a dozen characters in play at once.
100% Completion? Good luck!
It doesn’t take long to get through all three stories, roughly eight
to nine hours the first time if you don’t do too much wandering, but as
with all LEGO games, you’re dumped into the open-world after you finish
the main story to try your hand at a few dozen hours of post-game
content.
There’s still the typical challenges of finding the golden bricks
hidden within the levels, but there’s also a bunch of smaller
challenges, like finding all five cowboy skeletons in one level. It’s
easily one of the larger LEGO games to date as you have the whole scope
of the franchise available to you. It doesn’t feel too large though, as
you can fast travel once you find a statue in each area that unlocks a
map filled with hidden info for the area.
There’s still a few problems.
Despite a brilliant presentation, LEGO Lord of the Rings is not
without its fair share of problems. It froze up and required a restart
multiple times throughout the game, usually during cutscenes, which
often resulted in lost progress. There was also some weird checkpoint
issues where the game couldn’t determine whether to load my latest
manual save from a save statue or an auto-checkpoint, so it decided to
do both, resulting in a loss of progress in one spot, but the saved
progression in a further area.
However, this doesn’t stop LEGO Lord of the Rings from being one of
the best LEGO titles yet. It manages to find a brilliant sweet spot
between linear set-pieces and larger puzzles and exploration that make
it a joy to play through. The story cinematics might appeal to those who
are too young to have seen the films when released, but they still
managed to get a solid stream of laughs. All of this together makes it a
wonderful experience for new and old fans alike.
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