Among the problems with Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s children’s novel The Hobbit (and there sure are a lot) it’s that he almost had to completely change the audience’s perception of the dwarves that inhabited the cinematic fantasy world he established in The Lord Of The Rings. Portrayed with tempers as short as their stature, possessing little to no sense of humour and often the butt of many a joke, phrases such as ‘nobody tosses a dwarf’ cemented the diminutive rock-bashers legacy as comedic foils. Then came the pathos. In The Hobbit, the band of dwarves all have solemn tales to be told, some harrowing backstory to paint these fearsome warriors as tortured souls seeking to reclaim their land and wealth from a greedy dragon. Spending hours upon hours in their company was an endeavour as exhausting as Mount doom and almost entirely joyless. Perfect material for a Lego game!
Lego The Hobbit’s biggest flaw then is how slavish it is to its source material. In the same veinasLegoTheLordOfTheRings,thegame retells the story of the movie, lifting the original dialogue from the films for authenticity. This doesn’t quite work as well in this instance, mainly because the script isn’t quite as sharp as its predecessor’s and the pacing is all over the place.
The first chapter is both heavy in exposition and gameplay mechanics. A lot of the features from Lego: The Lord Of The Rings return, such as the open world map and character radial, and then a few other elements poached from elsewhere – notably the construction mini- game found in The Lego Movie Videogame. But there’s much more here besides that, balancing multiple playable characters that feature their own unique skills and weapons, while loot gathering and crafting offer further incentive to smash-up everything you possibly can in the hunt for further spoils.
It can seem a little overcomplicated at times for a younger audience, particularly in the segments where you’ll have to use one dwarf to mine specific special items, before switching to another to hit a switch. Still, it does a better job of making each dwarf stand out than the movies considering its large cast, even if they’re a less charismatic bunch compared to the Fellowship. It could be considered one of the more ambitious entries in the Lego gaming canon, its approach differing from its predecessors in that it often resembles a pre-school role- playing game. With loot and crafting such fundamental aspects of the game design, switching between various members of your party, it does an admirable job of balancing elements of the genre without coming across too overwhelming.
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There’s also a refreshing amount of variety in how a lot of these elements are executed through gameplay. It drops into rhythm-action for certain tasks, such as crafting – and even features a completely interactive musical number – while quick-time events and co-op play a more key role. The game isn’t short on ideas and often finds inventive twists on the simplistic design of its puzzles, without heavily recycling the same solutions. That said, with the expansion of features, characters and mechanics, some of the old Lego problems are exacerbated. The game remains fundamentally fiddly; with multiple actions mapped to a few buttons, simple commands become a brief struggle to execute and something as simple as character-switching should really have been
nailed down by this point in the franchise. TT Games still manages to make all its faults negligible, such is the series’ inimitable charm that manages to be utterly addictive and treat its source with both reference and a keen eye for humour. It both satiates the appetite of young fans, while acting as a reminder to older gamers as to why they loved the source material in the first place.
And it’s here, again, that Lego The Hobbit stumbles. Your enjoyment will largely be dictated by what you think of the first two films (rumours abound that the final film in the trilogy will be added as DLC), which have split critical consensus. Certainly, they’re not quite as action packed and trundle along at a pace that makes The Lord Of The Rings look like The Fast And The Furious.
One of the first chapters in the game essentially involves making dinner for the dwarves in Hobbiton, wrecking Bilbo’s pantry in order to find the right items to keep them fed. There’s a loss of scale that makes each new chapter feel lacking, its battles less spectacular than what has come before in other Lego games, its characters less engaging. Much like the film, there’s a sense that content has been stretched, while new narrative has been crudely implemented to paper over the cracks.
This isn’t TT’s fault by any means, but it does make for a game that has to wrangle a sloppy a story, awkwardly transitioning from Ian Holm’s older Bilbo as narrator, before those duties are passed onto Christopher Lee’s Saruman for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. It’s not the best Lego game by any means, mostly due to the lacklustre licence at its core. However, Lego The Hobbit still demonstrates TT Games’ willingness to experiment with the series’ popular design and it makes some strides here to shake-up the formula in exciting new ways. If you love The Hobbit then you’ll find the world absolutely crammed with things to do and see, but those that were disappointed by Jackson’s second Middle- earth trilogy might not want to be reminded of the cinematic misfire.
