Lego The Lord of the Rings

Game Info

Sauron wants his ring back…now!

Sauron has been reborn and the One Ring must be found!  Now, it is up to Frodo to get the Ring to Mount Doom…but the power of the Ring is seductive.  With his fellowship, Frodo is building his way across Middle-Earth one block at a time.

Lego The Lord of the Rings is video game adaptation of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  The video game is Lego’s follow-up to Lego Batman 2:  DC Super Heroes also released in 2012.  The game was generally well received.

I’ve played most of the Lego licensed games.  Each time I play a Lego game, I think that I won’t play another, but something ends up hooking me.  You can get hurt, you can’t die, but there is something entertaining that keeps drawing you back…and then driving you crazy in the process.

Like always, you can be almost anyone. If you still want to play by the time you unlock them…

This Lego game chases a bit of the format of the game.  It adds the “quest” to the mission with encountered characters making requests from the characters.  The prize is either the Red Bricks or the Mithril Bricks which can be transformed into different weapons.  This does add a bit more replay to the game and lends more the open world exploration…but it makes the gameplay extremely long if you want 100%.

There are control issues with the game.  There isn’t any real new gameplay to the standard Lego game, but there are some very frustrating moments in free play involving switching between characters.  Sometimes it jumps between characters when you want to switch characters in the character reals, and other times, you select the other character causing you to switch and lose your place of the other character…having more than two characters on the screen also involves multiple switching which is frustrating…plus, you have a questionable camera at points.

Oh look…a Lego Gollem in a real swamp…

The graphics of the games is a bit strange as well.  The settings are sometimes ultra-real, but you have a Lego character running through it interacting with Lego artifacts…it is a bit of a weird set up that gets stranger each game as the environment graphics get better.

The Lego series of games is harmless fun (I don’t even understand why this is rated 10+ since they neuter most of the violence of the movie).  The Lego games continue to be good intro games for younger gamers.  For adult gamers, the Lego fun is seeing this reinterpretation and mindless (almost literally mindless) gameplay which just has you playing to win with little challenges to gaming skills.  Lego The Lord of the Rings was followed-up by Lego Marvel Super Heroes in 2013.  The adaptation of The Hobbit films (Lego The Hobbit) was released in 2014.

Related Links:

The Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

The Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers (2002)

The Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King (2003)

Lego The Hobbit