LEGO® The Lord of the Rings™

I have just spent 3 hours playing with my 5 yo. The movies are a bit advanced for his age, but this proved to be a great starter.

This is an older title, and it does have a bit of a difference from other titles with the item system. The biggest issue with this game is that there are just too many cut scenes, go through part of a level, cut scene, another bit, another cut scene, finish the level, cut scene. Now granted if you try to 100% the game you'll get more play than cut scenes, mostly because you can skip them once you go through once. But looking at this game, I feel like Tt simply wanted to do a digitized version of the LOTR movies in a Lego game more so than make a game of LOTR.

What I have to say is a contrast to the other reviews. I don't see this as the peak of the Lego games, instead what I see is an awkward middle ground between the pinnacle of the "first generation" games, Lego Harry Potter 5-7 (which came out 6 months before this), and the perhaps a little bloated but quite refined DC Super Villains (which came out in 2018). The interface is just clunky - selecting abilities is an exercise in pain. Especially when you're under attack. The game does not pause when you're in the selection wheel, nor when you're holding down the button waiting for the timer to fill up so that it can present you with the menu. Using craftable abilities is even worse. Earlier games just gave them to you from a red brick, here you have to scroll through a 12x7 grid to find the one single item which you need (no mouse, you're using arrow keys or a joystick). And there are so many of them. Platforming? There are some incredibly obnoxious sections in the overworld (a new thing) and also in missions, worse than the other Lego games that I've played. It now has actual voiced dialogue (clips from the movies, you can hear background noise), which I don't like. Maybe I'm a minority, but I preferred the old pantomiming and humming. It gave the games a very unique and endearing quality. The most unpleasant addition for me is game crashes. Harry Potter 1-4 and 5-7, DC Super Villains, Star Wars, Clone Wars - all of them ran perfectly for me (on my Linux system). Here, I had two crashes and I haven't even finished the campaign yet. Fixed one by disabling FSAA, maybe the other one might work if I disable dynamic lighting (something which supposedly made earlier games panic as well). All that said, the gameplay itself is still decent. If you can withstand the bloat of unpolished extra functions and the obnoxious platforming, and if the game doesn't crash on you. Then perhaps you might like it if you liked the other Lego games.

Lego Lord of the Rings is a pretty standard Lego game, fun and simple. My only problem is I've run into a ton of bugs while playing so far, including the camera glitching out, characters getting launched into the sky for no reason or falling into the terrain or even spawning in the wrong spot when loading a level so that it's impossible to complete the level and you have to start over. I've even had the game crash to desktop a couple of time. I've played a number of Lego games, they've all been enjoyable, but this one has to be the buggiest one I've played.

fun to play easy to understand exactly like the movies