This adventure is a love letter to old classics. I am not a fan of single click interfaces, but most of the time it works good enough (except with the inventory, I hope the inventory handling will be adapted in the future). The game is split into three "chapters". Fist one introduces you to prim and her new family and sets the stage. The second part contains the three main quests that are necessary to undo the damage that Prim has caused in the first part. And then of course there is some kind of finale. The recors in Thanatos library are a nice touch, Apart from some locomotion issues and the inventory, the main critic point is basically the length of the game. It's as short as some mid 80s classics. Also I would have wished for some more complex story arcs. The four main quests are all very limited to who you have interact with and where. Most of the time everything's very straight forward which is ok for beginners, but a bit overwhelming for experienced adventure game players. I somehow did expect to be on a longer journey. The two mini games are not all too hard once you understand that for one of them the instructions are wrong (in the current version). Who'd have thought that a LOWER speed value is actually better than a high one? All in all a nice adventure game which could have been more.
One of the best in the LEGO game series, maybe the one with the most varied gameplay mechanics. A inventory with tools to use, carrying or throwing small characters ... you don't find that in other LEGO games. The levels vary too, not all have the same entertainment factor tho. The swamp level is not something I'd play several times just for fun. The game has the typical LEGO game problems when it comes to collision detection and path finding. Some jump sequences can be annoying as the characters refuse to jump in the given direction or fall down for no reason, in this case probably even worse than usual, since the geometry of the levels is a lot more detailed than in other games. Graphical glitches like flickering shadows or in a few cases the background showing through the cape of a character are present as well. Even with the light hearted TT style this game has a much more serious tone in story telling, due to the serious tone of the movie and voice casting. For the LotR fan the old MMO is still the way to go, especially for those whoe want to go deeper into the lore. But TT did a really fine job representing the world in this game, of course it's all scaled down. But being around Edoras, seeing all the important landmarks and being able to reach them is great. Having played LotRO for years it was a bit like coming home. Finally this game found a DRM free home.
I bought the DLC in order to have the complete game. But the DLC really doesn't add much value to it. Sure, your next playthrough will look a bit different if you took your time to customize the chars before starting. But there is not THAT much more variety.
