The Troll Hoard is the fifth level in the Story Mode. To get to the level start, follow the stud trail to the giant door with the craft table in front of it. Do the Lego build to create a giant key, then use two characters to pick up the key and carry it towards the door. The goal in the first area is to find and open three chests. The first chest (white) is sitting on top of a pile of rubble just to the right of the entry path. There is a large brown chest on the path, against the left wall, that can be destroyed to reveal a gold Lego hook. "Build" the hook up onto the ceiling, then use Dori to hang from it. Once Dori is hanging, get another character to jump on him, which will pull up a cage revealing a cracked dwarf plate. Buddy-up with a dwarf to smash the plate, bringing the chest down. Use Gandalf to open the chest. To get the second chest (grey), look for a red "picnic blanket" Lego plate on the ground on the right side of the area. Put Bombur on the blanket, then "feed" him 5 carrots and 6 fish, transforming him into a trampoline.
Jump on his belly to reach the area above, then destroy the spiderweb and "build" the gold Lego hook behind it up onto the ceiling. Use Dori to grab the hook and swing to the other side. Destroy the objects between the hatch and the large chest to send a barrel falling down to clear the rubble away from the lower hatch. Send Thorin up through the hatch to open the chest. The third chest (brown) is back in the center rear area. Bring Gandalf in to light up the area. Look for the hanging cage on the left with a skeleton in it. Destroy the crates in front of it, then build a weighted slingshot target. Use Ori to shoot the target a few times to bring the cage crashing down. Use the rubble to build steps leading up to the platform with the chest. After the cut scene, the gameplay moves to a new area where the goal is to use Radagast to heal five sick rabbits. Switch to Fili and look for a dig spot on the ground on the left side. Dig out the sick animal, then have Radagast come heal it. The second rabbit is in the center of the area towards the rear.
The third rabbit is up in a tree in the right rear. Use to pull the gold Lego hook on the front of the tree. Use the debris from the door to build a craft table. Do the Lego build to create a lift, then push the green/red crank to raise it and bring the sick rabbit down to the ground. The fourth rabbit is in the front right center of the area. The fifth rabbit is in the center left area towards the rear. Once the final rabbit has been healed, a cut scene launches, then a chase begins. Radagast needs to defeat three enemies by jumping from his sled onto their horse, then following the button prompts to defeat them. In the new area, go up the stone path to the right then buddy-up to break the cracked wall and go through. Use Thorin to shoot the two targets up on the left, bringing the gold hook down, then build it back up onto the large boulder. Use Dori to latch onto the hook and bring the boulder down. Enemies will now attack the party, but it's the one up on the ridge, holding a target sign, that needs to be defeated.
Use Thorin to shoot arrows at him. Hit him three times to defeat him and end the chapter. All collectibles from the level are detailed below, though some can be picked up in the initial Story Mode playthrough. The first area in the chapter. The second area in the chapter. Be sure to pick everything up before healing the fifth rabbit, as that will end the section. This portion begins with the sled chase.As much as Lego The Hobbit was inevitable - as well the last words Bilbo would ever want to hear while being flown around by those eagles - it does rather beg the question: "Wait, now?" We're only two thirds of the way through the unnecessarily bloated film trilogy, leaving a gap the size of Smaug's corpse in the story, with a concluding DLC pack nothing more than a rumour at present. For now, though, we have the initial parts, "Too Many Dwarves" and "Holy Crap, What an Awesome Dragon": two blockbusters, now with endlessly more blocks to bust and enough irreverence to make that barrel ride look like the Silmarillion as read by Orson Welles.
If you've played any of the Lego Whatever games before, that about sums it up. They don't change a vast amount between licenses and this one is no exception. Two-player co-op that's perfect for parents and kids, running through a slapstick version of the first two movies, swapping characters to use different skills and smashing everything that can be smashed for both items and the delicious jangling sound of thousands of Lego studs going into the pot. Levels are linear and recreate moments from the movies, unlocking for free play once completed, with plenty more to do on a sprawling world map full of additional characters, quests and other goodies to make 100% completion a solid challenge for any player. Like Lego The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit uses the actual voices from the movie, with the growling seriousness of the characters, to great advantage. It's a whole universe of pratfalls and visual gags: building a giant key to open a door only to have the dwarves use it as a battering ram, leaving armoured orcs in their comedy boxer shorts with a good hit and stuffing Bombur with food to turn him into a bouncy trampoline.
It doesn't work quite as well as last time, but only because The Hobbit is already a much goofier adventure than The Lord of the Rings. Making fun of something with its tongue in its cheek is always harder than spoofing the serious, especially when restricted to visual gags and clips of the original dialogue. (There is additional voice work too, which immediately stands out as "wrong", especially the narration - but it's restricted to characters like the traders who hand out quests on the world map.) It's as entertaining as ever, though - up to a point. The main problem is that the party here doesn't have the same distinctiveness that other Lego games offer. Which dwarf has the bow? Who can crack things open? Why are any of them afraid of the dark? The longest part of most puzzles is simply flitting between everyone, trying to find the one with the skill for the next lock. The group does, however, get more interplay than usual, with a big selection of characters to reinforce the team dynamic and shared actions like directly teaming up for buddy-attacks against bosses like the Goblin King or making towers of dwarves with staves so that another character can climb to higher ledges and unlock a path for the rest.
If you haven't seen the movies, you're going to be completely lost by the abridged story, but that seems pretty unlikely. As usual, some scenes barely pay lip-service to the original - the game's idea of being hunted by wolves, for instance, is to have them all sitting in a clearing while Radagast heals things - but the best are really impressive. An early highlight is the storm giant battle, which begins blandly with the party split on two levels of a cliff having to trade puzzle solutions to clear blockages, but then ends with everyone running around platforms carved into the giants themselves as they battle it out. Other big moments are at least always cute, like the riddle contest with Gollum now involving Bilbo and a confused goblin (because there always has to be a second player) building the answers. Individual levels can easily hit a few scenes at once, seemingly ending only to keep going instead of taking a break. Usually that's fine, though a few do outstay their welcome, including the always-awful combat arenas and bigger scenes like the escape from Goblin Town.
Unfortunately, the main addition this time is also by far the most tedious bit of the game. It's long been a complaint of the Lego series that they don't allow for any building, and Lego The Hobbit changes that - a bit, in much the same way that giving sunscreen to a man dying of thirst in the desert is technically doing him a favour. There are now crafting platforms around the world, both in the linear story levels and the open world. By bringing them materials from mining, smashing things and fighting - which can often involve just grinding and trying not to yawn hard enough to create a black hole - they provide extra stuff that is shielded by a second layer of terrible mini-game, in the form of watching the thing being built piece by piece and occasionally having to point to the next component to use. The Lego Movie it is not, even if there is a certain intricate charm to seeing the pieces raining down to make something. At this point, criticising a Lego game for being much like the other Lego games feels somewhat pointless.