Your first lego game will always be your best... because the repetition would kill any enjoyment. So choose the one that interests you most, but...
...if you ever had the thought to get lego: lotr for the "open-world Middle Earth" gameplay, I suggest you smack your head and lose that thought. Here are my thoughts when I "finished" it, posted a while ago:
I can assure you that voice acting is not the problem. I only played two LEGO games, Clone Wars and this. I loved Clone Wars, collected everything in it. I don't know if you're a Tolkein fan or a LEGO game fan, but no matter what I'd say this is NOT the open-world middle-earth game you are looking for, and not a good game by any stretch. I was one of the few who was more hyped for this than Black Ops 2 and spent my savings on the PC version of this instead of Blop2, and I regret it a lot.
I finished the main story and quite a lot of the side quests, replayed half a dozen of the missions (as are all LEGO games, you can't access all the spots in the first playthrough), playing till I got enough studs to get all the multiplier red bricks. I think the quick look showcased the best parts of the game.
First, the world. It's small and scaled down much, not that I expect it to be 1:1, but being able to see Minas Tirith from Edoras is ridiculous. The starting areas Hobbiton, Bree, and Rivendell seem big enough and you'd expect all the major vistas are as large in the open world, but no. Minas Tirith you can only access the top most level; Edoras has only three houses. The missions are triggered in the smaller open-world and is scaled more appropriately, but...
The mission design is boring and I hardly went through all the levels again, just replayed enough to get the items to craft and finish quests for getting red bricks. They were bad even first time through. You can say it's standard LEGO gameplay with a lot of repeating the same puzzle three/four times with slight variations, yet it felt like it dragged on and on without any truly spectacular moment. Clone Wars had shit blowing up all the time, and with the source material, LEGO Lotr's battles aren't even that epic. The Helms Deep level, which was often demoed, was the only one that seemed like there are thousands of orcs storming Hornburg. Not only is the Seige of Minas Tirith cut, the Pelannor Fields battle was not even close to the scale of the Helms Deep level. So yes, the game gets more disappointing as you progress, everything seemed rushing to an end.
But my MAJOR MAJOR gripe is with the platforming, specifically in the open world. It's a terrible platformer. I don't recall ever getting this frustrated trying to jump up things in Clone Wars. Each major landmark in the open world has a tall structure to climb, and only viable if you have the right equipment crafted or that specific character role. The platforming is floaty like all LEGO games but this game demands so much more. It's also insanely inconsistent with the snapping to ledges and small platforms. Did I mention the game is buggy? There are walls only climbable with Smeagol or craftable mithril climbing shoes, and sometimes your character jumps off if you are too close to the edges of the walls. Yet sometimes you can be dead centre of the climbable portions and STILL be propelled away. If you fell off, you're gonna have to go step by step back up again. Adding to the frustration is that sometimes you don't have the right equipment (yet) and you'd need a specific character to continue jumping up, and you'd have to hold the change character button to bring up the wheel for you to swap in the one you need (you can only bring two characters in the open world, the others can be swapped in and out any time). But it's extremely finnicky about how long you hold it; sometimes the game reads it as a press and immediately gives you control of the one at the bottom of the tower, and the one who you were scaling it with would jump down to follow you.
And what do you get after a frustrating 30 minutes? Usually at the end there's just one more mithril brick which is used for, well, crafting. Sometimes there are characters on top of towers to buy. In my quest to buy every character (oh and I thought Clone Wars had a more diverse roster, I guess it's the source materials fault that everyone in LOTR are sword people), I had to climb the Orthanc and that was the point I stopped. It was so infuriating I gave up on 100%-ing it.
TL;DR: It's not a good LOTR game, nor is it a good LEGO game. Sure, the reimagining of the Peter Jackson films in the light-hearted LEGO style is always great, and I guess it'd be fine for a co-op game, but I still suggest not to put yourself through this bullshit.
Log in to comment