With thirteen dwarves, Bilbo, Gandalf and a range of other heroes flitting in and out of the game, there’s been a real effort made to give each character some distinctive capability, whether it’s a sling or a bow and arrow to fire at target switches, a grapple to swing across chasms or drag down the scenery, or – in chubby Bombur’s case – a unique approach to makeshift trampolines. Yet Lego: The Hobbit isn’t content to retread the same old ground.
If you’ve played any Lego game since Lego Star Wars, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the basics work. The gameplay covers all the usual stuff: smashing up the scenery to collect Lego studs, reassembling chunks of smashed scenery into new shapes, unlocking different characters, and using their varying abilities to get past every obstacle in your path. Middle Earth – or at least those parts of it dealt with during The Hobbit – becomes an open-world map, linking together a series of chapters that take you through the events of An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug. Nor does the content exactly defy expectations.
The only real surprise is that we get it now, with the last film still to come (we can expect ‘There and Back Again’ to be covered by a DLC pack when the movie is released). Given the success of Lego: LOTR and the first two parts of Peter Jackson’s three movie adaptation, this is hardly an unexpected game. Just as last year’s Lego Marvel Super Heroes built on and reworked 2012’s Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, so Lego: The Hobbit finds fresh ideas with which to add to the same year’s Lego: Lord of the Rings.
True, you’ll find some miserable souls complaining that the games are formulaic and repetitive – that they’re really all the same once you look beneath the movie skin – but they’re the ones missing out.Įach Lego game might not differ much from the last one, or even the one before that, but there’s always some slant, some new innovation or twist, that lends the game a different feel. So many games based on so many familiar characters and movies, and still the TT Games Lego series has yet to jump the shark. Available on Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4 (reviewed), Wii U, PC