LEGO Lord of the Rings

There are only a handful of Lego games missing from my collection and now I can tick Lord of the Rings off of the list, but not without some degree of effort.

As easy as they are, the Lego games are a grind and a half. This is second open world Lego game I’ve played (I’m not counting LEGO Indiana Jones 2 because it was a bag of wank) and the open world stuff was, to some degree, more enjoyable than the actual story missions.

The story missions follow the main story of the three Lord of the Rings films and I found I suffered the same issues with the game as I did with the film; I found the Frodo and Sam bits really boring and looked forward to the Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli bits.

I don’t know why they insist on doing this but they always have an obligatory vehicle level in every Lego game, even in Lord of the Rings. This one features the Warg attack where you have to fight off the Orcs on Dogs. To be fair though, they seem to be learning from their mistakes as the level is very short.

In terms of game play, it’s okay. It’s the not the best Lego game ever but it’s by no means the worst. The levels are slowly becoming the worst part of the game. I hate having to reply stuff that’s easy and I find it really annoying that you have to replay the story levels in order to collect all of the extra stuff as you have to do a free play run through to collect all the shit you couldn’t get in story mode. This is even more unnecessary not that they have introduced the open world function. Why not limit the running around and collecting things to the open world and only subject the players to one playthough of the story?

There were a couple of glitch-outs which also meant that I couldn’t complete some levels and had to turn it off and come back to it later. Also, there were a few bits of the game that weren’t really clear and it took me ages to figure out what I had to do. There was one part where I had to get one character to stand in a certain area while the other character did something else and there was another section where there was a moveable block that did not stand out and it took me ages to figure out it could actually be moved.

However, linking in with the first stumbling block, the worst thing about the game is the AI controlling the second character. The amount of times that I needed to use both characters to do a specific thing and I got one of the characters in the right position then switch to the other only for the other character to abandon what I had asked it to do, was stupid.

While the music is good and in keeping with the theme of the movies, it reminded me how horribly depressing it is, especially the ‘ring is draining your soul’ style music which, most annoyingly, appears to be the most used in the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

It has the standard complete every story level and get to 100% completion which covers off 29 of the achievements but it should be mentioned that while this is not difficult, it is one hell of a slog. There is always the achievement for the 100% completion but I swear that the makers of these games are continuously trying to make their games even longer and slog-like.

In addition to the 100% related achievements, there are the standard, do weird shit with the Lego characters achievements, including some secret ones which you would in no way consider doing during normal play.

Some are actually quite funny. There is one for throwing Isildur into the fires of Mount Doom in the prologue which is called ‘it won’t be that easy.’ There is also another for walking into Mordor on the open world map coined ‘One does not simply...’ referencing a famous line from the film.

There is one challenging achievement that took me a few goes and it involves clearing the Mines of Moria in under fifteen minutes, a task that I thought was impossible and is not helped by the character switching issues I mentioned earlier. It fact, it is made worse by the fact that you have to do this in story-mode where you have the option to switch between the nine different characters. With the questionable AI functionality and the fact you are on a timed run, it puts the achievement more down to luck than skill which is really annoying.

In addition to challenging there is also fucking stupid. There is an achievement for collecting 10,000,000,000 credits, money that you will never spend and takes ages to accumulate even with the stud multipliers activated. And the best part is, once you’ve done it, it will just sit there not needing to be spent. Brilliant.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Lego Lord of the Rings is much more of a slog than I thought it would be and the music made it even more difficult to come out of the post game depression coma. I’m going to need a quick and easy win to get over this one.