LEGO® The Lord of the Rings™

I don't know a lot about the Lord of the Rings but this game really makes me want to watch the movies and read the books. This game holds up really well today asides from a few bugs like in a certain fight at the end of the game where you need to mash X, but having your game on a refresh rate above 60 and with Vsync OFF makes it near impossible to perform. Other than that, it is so damn good

A big part of what made the lego series fun is that they characters couldn't speak. They had to convey the plot of an established franchise without dialogue, and it was interesting to see how they did that each time. The characters had more *character* when they couldn't talk, because without dialogue, they had to rely on the broadest strokes of what the characters were like, and that's fertile ground for parody. Lego Batman and Lego Han Solo were more than just Lego proxies of established characters, they had unique personalities. The game's fine but I miss when they didn't talk.

I love The Lords Of The Rings and this video game is a good adaptation of the trilogy with Lego humor.

I had played this all the time as a kid and used to do yearly rewatches of the LOTR trilogy too, so I may be a bit nostalgic. I feel like this game really holds up. I love how the open world aspect interacts with the story mode missions, giving an oppurtunity for exploration while still being able to guide the player to next objective in order to progress the sstory. I'm so glad this game came out in time for voice acting, while I do have fondness for some of the older lego games too, this one has always been my favorite. I also find it really fun that you can talk to random NPCs and do side quests either as you play or during the post-game. This game also gave me some more appreciation for the movies, and as I became more familiar with the lore, also then gave me some more appreciation for the game again too. I also find that the mechanics are really fun, such as having to frequently throw Gimli so he can break things. I would definitely recommend this game to anyone interested in having a fun and silly time playing through the events of the movies.

The biggest threat to Middle-Earth isn't Sauron, it's the staggering number of bugs you'll encounter in this game. I know that the LEGO games are on the high side of jank programing, but this one is the worst I've played. I've had to restart levels so many times because glitches happened where characters got stuck in walls, bosses glitched out and became unkillable, or the item I was just holding disappeared from my inventory and now I can't open that lock that I need to open to progress the level. And what's worse is that there are some bugs that don't just affect the level, but will lock you out of ever getting some collectables and 100% the game. For example, in Amon-Hen, it somehow double counted one of the treasures I got, and I finished the level with 4/3 treasures. This caused some overflow error, so I didn't get the mithril brick for finding all the treasures in that level, which means I couldn't forge all the items at the blacksmith, which means I can't unlock the blacksmith as a character, and that also stops me from unlocking the last character for getting all the other characters. To fix this I would have needed to start not just the level over, but the entire game. A large part of the allure of LEGO games is collecting all the collectables, and well, they broke that. There are also a ton of other smaller problems with the game. The controls on the block moving puzzles for Gandalf are atrocious, the camera is terrible, and the animations that your characters do for special actions are cute maybe the first few times you do them, but feel real drawn out after the 20th time you dug a hole or lit a fire in a level. Now I'm not saying there's no fun to be had in this game, but at several points it went from fun to drudgery trying to get through this thing. Maybe if you're only interested in the story, but then why not just watch the movie?