“Even The Smallest [Lego] Can Change the Course of the Future”

Released in 2012, Lego: The Lord of the Rings provides an addictive take on a famous movie series. With characters as Legos, the game is both family friendly and funny.

Looking around, you’ll first see that buildings, characters, and weapons are made of lego pieces. The game’s currency, lego studs, can be collected by breaking, smashing, or fixing objects. You’ll be amazed by the incorporation of legos and the how the game manages to make its scenes distinct from the movies.

If you’re a lego video game veteran, you already have dozens of different lego games. Through this review, I hope to give valuable insight and a basic understanding of the game to decide whether it’s worth owning.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

Graphics: 8 / 10

A strength of the game, the graphics consist of two parts, backgrounds and lego pieces. The backgrounds do not feature legos and look more realistic. While there are those who would rather have complete sets of legos, I find them helpful for engaging me in the play. With real graphics for lava streams and mountains, the levels offer exciting play.

The only criticism about the backgrounds would be the extent to which the game features them. On several levels, only a few legos appear on a fighting area, which shows less innovation.

The lego pieces show clear detail and stay true to the look of objects and characters in the movies. I found large scale lego buildings rare and most of the lego objects stand out from the surroundings.

The lego movie scenes are well-crafted. Meant to copy the real scenes, the graphics look familiar, except with a few comedic twists. The balanced mixture of lego movie scenes and game-play keep the game interesting and enjoyable.

The quality of graphics would receive a perfect score, but the innovation of the backgrounds, or lack thereof, lowers it slightly.

8 / 10.

Sound / Music: 10 / 10

There’s no doubt about it, the music tracks make an amazing feature to the game. They’re very recognizable and taken directly from the movies. While original music would have been innovative, the real music gives the serious, dangerous atmosphere of LotR.

The quality of the songs are unparalleled; Their slow, clear harmonies bring back clear memories of the Lord of the Rings movies. They were carefully crafted for the movies; After passing such rigorous inspection, there is virtually nothing about them that I can criticize.

The quality of the songs are noteworthy. They appear carefully crafted and the distinct instruments play in harmony. Without a doubt, the impeccable music demonstrates Nintendo’s successful attempt to make a perfect first impression.

Sound effects peak at sound-levels louder than the music. Most of the time, they are softer, meaning that the soundtracks can be easily heard. The effects sound realistic and can be heard every time that you make the character jump, fight, or build. With their simplicity, they aren’t annoying and help gameplay.

Because the music nears perfection and so do the sound effects, there’s only one rating this game deserves.

10 / 10.

Addictiveness: 9 / 10

Lego video games are notorious for their addictiveness, and this game is no exception. Everything about the game, from the humor of characters, to the seriousness of movie clips and backgrounds, work to immerse you in the game and keep you playing for hours on end.

Interlaced with lego video clips that mimic the movies, The game has the right balance of gameplay and breaks to fuel addictiveness.

Longer levels do pose a problem for addictiveness as they might make you tire early. After a long and involved level, you’ll often find yourself too tired to engage yourself in the continuation. However, this game has the solution. The world outside the levels provides mini-quests and objects to destroy for studs. You can craft and buy new characters. So there’s never a dearth of things to do and you’ll find yourself playing hours after you’re tired.

As a social game, the multiplayer features screen splitting to allow players to move away from each other. The screens merge as users get closer and fully combine when you’re very close. This allows for users to play on separate areas of the map and bring split screen to a new level.

I’ve found that the game remains addicting for both single and multi-player many months after buying. The biggest problem I’ve faced is starting the game, since I remember how arduous the levels can be. However, once I start playing, I keep at it for hours on end.

The game is incredibly addictive, but very tiring. Thus, It deserves a score only a little less than perfect. 9 / 10.

Story: 10 / 10

The incredible story behind LoTR has made the books, movies, and games popular. The overall goal is simple, but within the plot lies difficulties, intriguing twists, and multiple events happening at once.

While the sequence of the game mostly linear, the levels may not be. If you remember the movies, while Sam and Frodo were facing their own difficulties Legolas, Aragorn, and Gandalf had their adventures too. The game is similarly constructed with the option to progress through the game on either side.

Once you’ve gone too far ahead on one end, you have to complete more of the other to proceed. The options to choose which way to progress improve gameplay and shows you how impressive dual parallel story-lines of a game can be.

With nothing to criticize about the story, the score remains perfect. 10 / 10.

Depth: 9 / 10

Within levels you search for enough coins to fill up your coin bar at the top to attain “True Adventurer”. You also seek silver bricks, try to unlock characters, and finish quests in middle earth.  

Without cheats, the game needs hundreds of hours to unlock every option and character and completely beat the game. A straight run-through still takes nearly ten hours for an amateur.

I still have several levels to get “true adventurer” and quests and items that I haven’t crafted and I’ve had the game for over a year.
The game cannot hope to reach the level of the movies / books but still has incredible depth.

9 / 10.

Difficulty: 4 / 10

I did not find enemies very difficult and automatically respawning where you lose all your hearts makes the game easy to pass through. If you’re trying to keep all your lego studs, you have to be more careful, but it’s still not terribly difficult.

On multiplayer, the difficulty stays easy as one player can remain ahead to figure out the best way to avoid falling and find the way to pass through a difficult section.

The funny, family-friendly video clips shows that the game was meant to cater to younger players too. The difficulty reflects this fact as fighting only requires the repeated click of a button and controls are easy to manage.

The only difficulty arises from the length of levels. Facing many weak enemies over the course of a level does cause loss of lives and studs. Furthermore, jumping over obstacles requires care and it’s one way that I’ve lost many studs.

Since the difficulty helps younger players and only arises from level length, this category deserves a rating of 4 / 10.

Overall: 9.5 / 10

My comparison of important categories leads to an astounding overall score of 9.5 / 10.

The strengths of the game stemmed from its length, depth, and graphics. Since it was based on an incredibly popular movie, access to a well-produced music and story-line helped it. The only weakness would be the lack of innovation by the designers. The game played off the popularity of the movies, so the designers bypassed most difficult parts of creating a successful game.

I would recommend that you buy this game if it’s one of your options. It keeps you engaged and is well worth its cost. I’m sure I’ll keep playing it for years to come.

In short, these are a few reasons where you might buy the game:
1. You want to buy a family-friendly game that’s humorous and fun at a social gathering.

2. You love lego games and you want to play another amazing creation by the same designers.

3. You love lord of the rings and you want to play an incredible game that’s based on it.

I rarely review this games this highly, so you might want to take that into consideration. Also, while high scores are helpful, take them with a grain of salt. Some of my favorite games I've rated much lower and they've had similarly great, addicting experiences.

I had so much fun re-examining Lego:LoTR. I hope you feel the same way once you play it!

Thank you for reading!

Great review very large and has all points, i played this game and i have to agree with you, it is a cool game.

Great job with this review man, it is good to see you are massively contributing by making great quality reviews because it really helps the site out. I like the way you started off the review with that little quote and then went from there with the intro and then transitioned into your review quite smoothly. Plus the overall organization of your review is impeccable, you make it clear and easy to read by bolding the top part of each category which makes it look very professional in my opinion, you clearly put a lot of time and effort to come up with this review man, I am impressed with the final result and this is by far (and probably the first) the best Lego game review I have ever read. Keep up the great work man and I look forward to your next review! 

ximex :
Razor-987 :

Thank you for the nice words! I really appreciate the positive feedback!

EideticMemory : That's was a really attractive and interesting review you made there Eidetic! Especially for a game that few may not look at and this review could possible drive them forward to giving the game a chance you did an awesome job with the explanation and detail as usual and I can't think of much else to say but great work!