Lego the Hobbit: The Video Game (2014) Video game released 8 April 2014 Do you have any images for this title? Rest of cast listed alphabetically: Bilbo Baggins, a simple Hobbit of the Shire is a Hobbit who doesn't like adventures accompanys 13 Dwarves and the Wizard Gandalf on a Quest to reclaim the Dwarves home of Erebor from the Dragon Smaug. Gandalf also has his own side quest regarding a familiar Shadow that is taking shape in an abandoned fortress called Dol Guldur.See All (8) » Add content advisory for parents » Release Date: 8 April 2014 (USA) Most of the lord of the rings characters were added to the game for example Sam and Frodo See more » Spun-off from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) Contribute to This PageYou should never toss a dwarf, not unless you're very brave. It'd take a braver man than I to hoist a shorty over my shoulder to sling him across a gaping hole. The level of tossing on offer here is a good indication of Lego games getting braver, then, because you'll spend a good chunk of your time hurling one particular dwarf across rivers, bridges, ravines and crevices with little care for the potentially very serious consequences.
From the quaint countryside life of Hobbiton in the west, all the way to Mordor's ashy sulphuric wastes in the east, that's a heck of a lot of dwarf tossing. Braver still, Lego Lord of the Rings takes a big stride into open-world adventure. It understands the importance of a quest and the freedom of an open road, and it successfully fuses it all with the wit and charm of a Lego game. The quality of the series' famous laugh out loud moments remains at an impeccable high, but their frequency takes a noticeable hit in order to keep the Lord of the Ring's dark tone intact. It's the most serious Lego game yet, but it's also one of the most engaging. With the entire trilogy - Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers and Return of the King - you're playing through 9 hours (if we're being conservative) of film here. story scenes are truncated as to not drag you into the mire of Jacksonitis, but you still get enough of the plot to feel like you're playing through your own plastic Middle-earth.
There's even a genuine sense of adventure, whether you're battling Black Riders on Weathertop, fighting off hordes of Uruk Hai at Helms Deep, or strolling into Rivendell as Gandalf for the first time, gazing out at the sumptuous sunsets. The open world structure also offers some freedom to the flow of the story, away from the rigidity of the series' restrictive, but honest, hub worlds. This time, story missions can span several scenes, especially during Twin Towers and Return of the King moments. Famously spectacular scenes, like Gandalf's battle with the colossal Balrog, are more like mini QTEs, but these sequences are impressive and infrequent enough to never stain the overall experience. With such a huge area to explore you'll have an embarrassingly low number on your percentage meter if you're just hopping from level to level. As with every other Lego game, completing a story segment opens up Free Play, where you're able to replay with characters non-specific to that particular scene.
This lets you access secret areas to gain extra collectables. You can also complete various side quests - unashamedly named Fetch Quests - which have you replaying in Free Play to grab various items for NPCs. These side quests are contrived, but the tasks you're set are at least as humorous enough to keep you from getting bored of hunting down random items. As well as buying characters, completing side quests, unlocking Mini Kits and reaching True Adventurer status, a new crafting and inventory system serves to further your investment in Middle-Earth. Collectible designs litter the overworld and story levels, which hold the secrets to the game's various tools and weapons and must be forged using (yet more) collectible Mithril bricks. Once completed your shiny new gear is accessed in free roam from your Treasure Trove, effectively sidestepping the need for a bunch of characters with their own unique abilities, and allows you to go about the overworld mopping up all the goodies you haven't yet been able to find because you've lacked a specific skill set.
Some are absolutely hilarious, too; we're looking at you, disco ball. Despite its obvious strengths, the inventory system is let down by sloppy implementation. Changing weapons requires you to hold down a button before a radial menu appears. With so much of standard Xbox 360 controller being left unused I can't help but think there must have been a more elegant solution. Switching characters also results in some unwanted fiddling, as the game often decides to forget a member of your party, forcing you to resort to yet another radial menu instead of, say, a tap of a button. All of the game's other issues fit in with the rest of the series. There's no online co-op, which has been a notable weakness for years, and the camera still creates some unnecessary annoyances, hiding things just off screen, which is a real pain when you're hunting for the last vital piece of a puzzle. Thankfully, for better of worse, the last few years of Lego games have been good enough that we're prepared to brush aside these issues.
Things like the lack of online co-op are undoubtedly more prevalent with each iteration, but Lego Lord of the Rings is still a huge success that's wonderfully adorable and an absolute delight to play. This review was written after spending 15 hours with a retail version of the game provided by Warner Bros. EMAIL TO A FRIEND Contains Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief What do these ratings mean? By this point, you'd think Lego might be tempted to rest on its laurels with its video game franchises. It's got a solid mechanic with a great sense of humor and licenses that sell well just by virtue of being the Lego version of a popular series. So it's fantastic to see titles like Lego The Lord of the Rings, Lego City: Undercover, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, and now Lego The Hobbit, continuing to push the evolution of the series. On the PS4, Lego The Hobbit is the first Lego game that takes advantage of the hardware, with a noticeable increase in visual fidelity.
It may sound weird to tout the visuals in a Lego game, but The Hobbit so perfectly nails the lighting and set design of the films that it would be eerie if you weren't staring at plastic minifigures. Make no mistake, this is the best-looking Lego game the developers at Traveller's Tales have made yet, and the higher resolution textures and lighting just give the whole thing a more polished sheen than ever before. Lego The Hobbit also pushes the cooperative gameplay of prior titles even further. With Lego Marvel Super Heroes, I was surprised how cleanly the developers divided tasks between individual characters' special abilities in order to force players to switch often, or if two or more players are working together, pay attention and collaborate. Lego The Hobbit goes farther by giving the dwarves collaborative gameplay where they must constantly help each other directly, linking up to climb short cliff faces, cross a gap on a grappling hook, or create a two-man team to fight one of the large-sized characters (like Trolls).
This is complimented by each character's normal and unique abilities. It's possible to change weapons in the middle of a fight to choose the best one. Most of the dwarves also carry axes, which can be used to smash cracked rock plates, usually creating a tumble of bricks and studs, but some carry unique weapons like bows, slingshots, flails, and spears, each which has targets in the environment that only it can take down. While each character has these unique abilities, it may be possible to find or craft special items with the same abilities on replays of the levels Story-wise, there's nothing that new, as the game uses the licensed audio from Hobbit 1 and 2, along with goofy Lego visuals. This makes the story weaker in comparison to Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which had an original plot but was on par with the other film-related games in the series. It's funny and charming, but it's essentially The Hobbit-lite. Production value is high, with gorgeous drawn illustrations between cinematics narrated by Christopher Lee (Saruman) giving the scenes context and reminding players what's going on in the story if they haven't sat down with it in a while.
And boy, is it possible to stray away from the story. Lego The Hobbit has no central hub from which to buy characters. Instead—as in Lego Lord of the Rings—they are given to you after completing a level, or are unlocked and available for purchase with studs on the expansive overworld Middle Earth section of the game. As you play the regular missions, new areas and "events" in Middle Earth become available. These events range from skill- or character-based challenges, to quests given by NPCs to earn Mythril or Red Bricks, often by delivering crafted items from the new crafting system. The crafting system adds a lot more incentive than the traditional collectibles of the past. The items you craft all have a specific function. While some are just cosmetic (a cape that makes you slimy), others may be weapon variants that are more powerful than the standard-issue ones. Crafted items can't be used in Story modes of levels, but they can also be equipped by any character at will during the Free-Play and Middle Earth sections.
To craft something of course, you need its material components. This is the first Lego game that rewards you with something more than studs when breaking down Lego objects and enemies, with precious gems, and buildable materials functioning as "Loot." Not just for crafted items, loot is also necessary for Lego Instruction Builds, a mini-game that has come over from The Lego Movie Videogame, where you create a set object out of Legos, selecting the correct parts at certain intervals in a timed challenge to earn more studs, in order to fulfill level or quest objectives. These instruction builds ignite the imagination, since they're fairly ingenious and based on real Lego designs for Middle Earth objects. One great example of their use are Gollum's riddles. Rather than just answering them, they become a puzzle where Bilbo creates the answer visually out of Legos. Another example might be that a Middle Earth quest requires you to build a bridge to get access to the other side of a river, and the only way is to mine the loot from nearby with a pickaxe to build the Lego set.
The crafting element, the Middle Earth overworld, and quests all build nicely into something that feels loosely inspired by games like Skyrim and online RPGs. A series of simple quests that net you some Mythril bricks, a vital crafting component for all crafted items, and the traditional silver brick from a single character may eventually build into a Red Brick. The 32 Red Bricks allow you to turn on features that make completing the game easier, like stud multipliers, in-level item locators, etc., as well as features that are just fun like mini-modes and a dance-party-like Carnival. This makes the whole package very much like a fantastic light-RPG that uses the Lego design aesthetic to stealth-in those RPG elements. It's still a Lego game, so it's not entirely perfect. Pure platforming in Lego games is always problematic, since control and perspective never quite line up perfectly for some reason, and those issues are especially present in some of the Middle Earth quests.
While the developers have fixed the issues with navigation between side-missions and the story mission that plagued Lego Marvel Super Heroes, there's still no way to select from the menu whether you want to turn on navigation for side quests or the main story quest without going to the quest-giver. Boats have fairly horrendous controls in tight quarters, which sadly comes into play when you are required to pilot Bard's smuggling vessel around Lake Town. There are also a few glitches here and there. On one occasion the game crashed completely, while on three others, it failed to recognize that I had completed an objective and I had to redo a quest from the start after waiting for it to reboot itself while I did other tasks. So, essentially, it has the same problems as many hardcore RPGs released today. But like those games, I can't stop playing it, and their happy-go-lucky characters and quests fill out the world in a way that is charming and delightful. If there's one place where Lego The Hobbit falters, it's the story which only delves into parts one and two of the film franchise.
While it's a massive game if you dive into the overworld Middle Earth quests, it's still tied to a franchise whose last film ended on a complete television-style cliffhanger. Sure, the Middle Earth quests fill out the world of Lego The Hobbit, giving it a uniquely Lego spin on the franchise, but the game can be played without doing more than one or two if they aren't sought out. Additionally, replaying the levels for quest objectives often reveals hidden sections of the level; in at least one instance, almost twice as much content as the first playthrough. However, there's no incentive for people who just want to play the story and have no drive to do the open-world quests, so swaths of gamers may play the game through the story's end and set it aside without accessing that content. On completing my first playthrough I had only completed 30% of the game's objectives. Lego The Hobbit is, if not the best Lego game, then closely matched with the top entries in the series.