Lego Lord of the Rings

Forum Post: Re: Voices

Sandlot76 — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:07:00 GMT

they sure sound like it

Forum Post: Re: The awesome job the awesome actors did in The Lord Of The Rings!

Sandlot76 — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:06:00 GMT

we enjoyed it as well.

Blog Post: As addicting as The One Ring.

Saint Dexter — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 17:17:00 GMT

Everyone has seen or played the Lego games. Whether it's watching your cousin blast through Stormtroopers in Lego Star Wars, or you actually playing them, fighting Voldemort in Lego Harry Potter. And everyone has to except it: they are great games! The most recent addition, Lego The Lord Of Te Rings, is, without a doubt, my favorite of them all. Let's see why. First of all, I am a HUGE Lord Of The Rings fan. I've read the masterpiece books, and I've seen the incredible movies. And I've played the wonderful video game. Traveler's Tales played a clutch move by making this game an open world. I was so tired of walking through a door to get to a level, and Traveler's Tales stopped my pain. The open world allows for many fun quests, building items with Mithril Bricks, and walking around Minas Tirith. That made me love the game. Also, the characters are all so much fun to play as! Breaking Morgul items as Aragorn wielding Anduril, using magic as Gandalf, or screeching very loudly as The Witch King, all the characters brought a smile to my face. The levels are also top notch. The puzzles are very fun to navigate, and tracking down all 10 treasure chests (minikits) is extremely entertaining. I had a couple prbolems with the game though. At multiple times in the game, my character wouldn't be able to move, but he could do everything else, such as swing his pan around. (I was playing as Sam Gamgee.) That occured more than once, and it was very frustrating. I also saw some unfinished enviorments, which surprised me, because all the other graphics were stunning. But don't let that stop you from buying it. It's is a great agme, probably one of, if not, Traveler's Tales greatest Lego games.

Blog Post: Lego Lord of the Rings Review: One Ring to Rule Them All

Still_Insane22 — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:08:00 GMT

Quality Lord of the Rings games are hard to come by. Maybe you're in the camp that thinks the game based off of The Two Towers was the best. Maybe you're in the camp that thinks Lord of the Rings Online is the best. Well, my friends, you needn't rummage through the bargain bin at Vintage Stock any longer. There's a game now that stands among those titles...and it's in Lego form.

In a lot of ways,Travellers Tales nailed the open-world aspect of Middle Earth. It may not be up to scale like maybe LOTRO is, but it's simple enough to navigate that you don't have to spend a lot of time scavenging the landscape for mithril bricks or quests. The story is basically how the unextended movies play out: Frodo Baggins, a hobbit, is entrusted with the Ring by Bilbo Baggins, his uncle, and later finds that he has to go on an epic quest to destroy it. After you complete the first part of the story, the characters are split into Frodo and Sam, and Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, and you can go back and forth between them, and it's done in such a way so you can't be in the third movie with Frodo and still be at Helm's Deep with the others. As dark as the book is, TT Games is still able to put in a funny Lego twist on it. It never feels too serious or too silly when necessary. My favorite place to go in the open world is The Shire, maybe because I love the music they play in the background, or how, I'm not mincing words, how awesome the Lego hobbits are. Every other major areas in the movies are incredibly detailed, and stay true to the layouts in the movie.

Gameplay and Graphics

Like most Lego games, Lego Lord of the Rings is a Platformer, but with a certain twist. The twists this time are RPG elements. As the story goes on, the characters get access to better weapons, like Frodo getting mithril armor and Sam getting elven rope. There're also items to be found across the levels. Not just minikits, but actual items that the characters can use to access certain areas in the level or wear to look awesome. An example would be if there was a place that required to be broken by an axe, and Gimli isn't available, you could go through something called "The Treasure Trove", where you can use an item like a bucket, fishing rod, or an axe and put on armor like a chest plate or boots. Unlike the last Lego game, where incentive to get Gold Bricks was to unlock characters, in this one you can take Mithril Bricks to a blacksmith that can smelt them down to make useful items for you. The more useful the more expensive. Aragorn can use Ranger skills and sniff out items, elves can jump higher, and smaller characters can go through small doors. The platforming aspects are easy to master and fun to use. It's not difficult, mind you, but that's not what the game is for. The challenge is in finding everything, possibly with a friend (the drop-in, drop-out co-op is seamless, by the way). Like the last two games, it will take you a while to finish, but it's worth it if you're a completionist. The game is also awesome to look at. The graphics are crisp, the scale doesn't do a disservice to the scale of some of the battles, and there's little to no frame rate chug.

Would I Shelve it After the Story?

Nope. Well, no Lego game is really like that. There's enough incentive to keep going after you beat the story, and I CAN'T go on without mentioning the clever achievements/trophies you can get. There're also quests to do to unlock Mithril Bricks and cheat bricks. Like I said, though, it will take a while to complete, but there's still enough surprises to find along the way to keep it from being too boring or repetitive.

Bugs/Glitches

I did experience some slow-down during the more intense sequences, but I kind of expected that. I did experience something in one of the first levels where something couldn't let me progress because of some invisible wall, but that problem seemed to be remedied the next time. I also encountered some character selection problems.

In short, despite some technical problems, Lego Lord of the Rings is a great game. It keeps a tone of epic with Lego charm throughout the game, and makes collecting everything a blast. Lego Lord of the Rings easily stands as one of the best Lego games and best Lord of the Rings game.

Blog Post: Best Lego Game Yet!

Cosmic — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:40:00 GMT

A lot of people say that all the lego games are the same and that is not true. Lego Lord of the Rings shows how far the franchise has come and what improvements that have been made. And now, with voice acting, the game is the best lego game yet. The gameplay is great and it still has some of the fun cheesy humor. This game also has a free roam type gameplay which makes it that much better. If you are thinking about getting it, definitely do. It is a great buy!

Blog Post: For Babies

xX_PS3_SWAG_Xx — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:50:00 GMT

Lego is for babies. Lord of the Rings is for losers. Graphics are terrible. Gameplay is broken.

Blog Post: Benefits of Changes Outweigh Issues

Joe Fathead — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 04:54:00 GMT

I dig Lego games. They're one of the few franchises that the wife and I play together, each with a controller. Normally she helps me figure games out - puzzles, where the heck was that guy with the potion, hey dummy use the new spell, that kind of stuff. But Lego games are great fun for us to each control a character and swap around. And they have a good sense of humor and are a welcome change of pace from some of our darker titles. It's hard for me to find fault with them, but with Lego LOTR I had a niggling issue or two. LOTR has nifty additions to the series, but these additions introduce a couple un-Lego-ish elements.

Game structure: I have a bunch of Lego games, but missed Batman DC Superheroes, so LOTR was my first Lego game with the more open world that Traveler's Tales is using recently. I am an exploration and loot junkie, so I found this aspect a welcome addition. As the GI review observes, that the story itself is merely the beginning gives the game excellent extended play value. However, niggle number one for me is story related. I am used to Lego characters being predominantly silent, only issuing Link-like exclamations and the occasional "Huh?". This imparted much of the series' charm, as the characters communicated without words. It was assumed that you were familiar with the stories upon which TT built the games, so little needed to be said. The migration of dialog, taken directly from the films themselves, kind of deflated that whimsy for me. The story seemed obliged to - generally, mind you - stick to a script, with a constraint forced on the game that previous titles seemed better able to circumvent, maintaining the spirit of the story while weaving in plenty of lighthearted humor. The humorous touches in LOTR felt more tacked on to a preexisting narrative than worked throughout the game development itself. Frodo says this, Gandalf replies thus, and oh yeah, we need something Lego here. Not a deal breaker, but noticeable.

A bigger issue is technical. We encountered a couple bugs in other Lego titles, but here there were more. We have the PS3 version. There is some tearing, which is annoying, but again not a huge problem. Also, I had one instance of the old "character falls through the background and off into the inky blackness of the electron-free void" gag. However, when playing this game, I had my first ever incident of console freeze. Total lock up happened three or four times. Didn't like it. That, and the load times are pretty significant and frequent. Admittedly, I didn't check into possibly installing the game on the hard drive, so I don't know if this would help, or if you even can, so take it with that grain of salt.

All that said, Lego LOTR is to be commended for expanding the Lego formula. If this was just a reskinned Harry Potter, I would have been disappointed. The open world encourages fun exploration, and LOTR also adds a fast travel system, which is great. We did a lot of backtracking in the Harry Potter games, which got kind of old.

Picking on a Lego game feels kind of like complaining that the super swell present you got for Christmas could have been blue instead of pink. So, while there is this and that, it's still a strong Lego game, and that's plenty of good fun.

Wiki: Lego Lord of the Rings Guides

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 03:54:00 GMT

Guides for Lego Lord of the Rings

Blog Post: Lego: The Lord of the Rings (PS3): One Game to Rule Them All

lotrgeek — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 03:04:00 GMT

I have been a Lord of the Ring fan since early 2003, and after play the Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean Lego games, all I could think was that they should make a LOTR Lego game, so having this game come out is a dream come true--Lord of the Rings is my all-time favorite movie and to see it turned into a Lego games is so cool!

First off, I just have to say that this is easily the best Lego game I've played as well as the best LOTR game I've played. The graphics in this game are excellent. The colors are bright and vivid and the scenery looks really realistic. I especially like how not everything is made out of Legos, which helps things look more real. This was especially true in Moria where a lot of the rock structures were regular computer graphics instead of constructed of Legos. The characters all look very much like they do in the movies. I also really like how they kept the original dialogue from the films. Having the characters talk gives the game a much more serious feel than previous Lego games, which I think is very fitting for LOTR. I also really love how many cutscenes the game has, and it's really cool seeing scenes from the movie acted out by Lego figures with the movie soundtrack in the background and the dialogue from the films with these tiny Lego characters speaking with the full force and volume of the actors from the movies.

I was somewhat concerned that the trademark Lego humor would be somewhat over the top and ruin the integrity of LOTR, but instead, it has only enhanced the enjoyability of the game. Whether it's Aragorn smoothing his hair when Arwen shows up, the Nazgul being locked in a restroom at the Prancing Pony, or Merry and Pippin wearing Groucho Marx glasses at the Council of Elrond to disguise themselves, this is the only game I've laughed this hard during.

As far as the actual gameplay goes, you play through pretty much every major area from the movies, such as Hobbiton, Rivendell, Moria, Edoras, Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith, and Mt. Doom, while controlling whichever characters were present in that environment in the movies. One thing I really like is how this game utilizes each of the characters special abilities so that you have to switch back and forth between characters in order to progress through the environments and get past obstacles. I felt I had to switch between characters to use their abilities much more often than in other Lego games which made this game more interesting and challenging. Furthermore, traveling from one area to another in the same order as the movies instead of always starting out from one central point like in other Lego games gives this game a more realistic and immersive feel to it. You can even pull up a map on your screen that looks just like the maps included in the books, so you really feel like you're exploring Middle-earth.

I plowed through the main portion of this game in about 10 hours, which I was disappointed about at first as I didn't want the fun to be over yet (This game is definitely shorter than the other Lego games I've played, but it makes sense seeing as how it's based on only three movies whereas the Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean Lego games are each based on four movies). Then my completion percentage popped up and it was only 25% so I realized I had plenty of more to do and enjoy. So far, I've played for about 25 hours and completed about 50% of the game. I can't compare the post-game to that of the other Lego games I've played since this is the only one I've set out to get 100% on, but I can say that it a lot of fun and allows you to explore areas you couldn't get to before.

Once you beat the game, you can replay levels using Free Play, which allows you to play as any character and so you have all the characters' special abilities available for your use which lets you get a number of items that were so tantalizingly hanging just out of your reach during your first play through. There are also lots of quests to complete, which each give you very handy rewards. My favorite part of the post-game, however, is going around purchasing new characters. This can take a while as most of the characters are pretty expensive, but it's worth it. Certain characters, like the Uruk-hai Berserker allow you to get past obstacles no other character can, and other characters, like Eomer, Faramir, and Eowyn are just fun to have in your arsenal. Furthermore, you can purchase characters that were in the books but not in the movies, and as a Tolkien fan, as well as a LOTR fan, I think that's really cool.

There is also a very fun Bonus Level you can unlock later on where you play as two of the villains who are then added to your character roster after you complete the level.

I do have a couple issues with the game that I didn't really notice until I started playing the post-game. The first is that during Free Play, you play as two characters at a time and you can either switch between them or open up your entire catalogue of characters and pick from that. The problem is that both of these actions require pressing the same button. To toggle between the two characters you just click the button whereas to open the character menu, you hold the button down. However, if you don't hold the button down just-so, you end up toggling between the two characters instead of opening up the character menu, which is rather annoying, particularly if one of your characters is high up because toggling causes that character to drop back down to the ground. The other issue I've had is that the camera angle is sometimes very odd. I've had the whole display spin around a couple times and at other times, I can't look around as much as I'd like to. Despite these problems, however, the rest of the gameplay and game controls are very smooth and the game is overall extremely enjoyable.

One of the few non-technical complaints I have (and it's a pretty minor one) is that there are some rather strange inconsistencies when compared to the movie. First, the game can't seem to get the colors of Arwen's outfits right. Everyone else's clothes are fine, but Arwen's clothes are not the colors they are in the movies. The other thing is that in the Rivendell area, the background music is from Lothlorien, even though all of the other music matches the correct area.

These few issues aside, this is an amazing game that I recommend to all LOTR and Lego fans. It has the perfect combination of humor, action, exploration, collecting, and questing, and it is an all-around wonderful game. It is definitely a game I will play again.

Blog Post: Walking Into Mordor With A Smile

Joe Juba — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:20:00 GMT

If you’ve played one Lego game, you haven’t played them all. That may seem obvious, but I’ve encountered too many people who dismiss new Lego titles based on the faulty assumption that they are all the same. Lego Lord of the Rings is the perfect opportunity to see how far this series has come since its inception; Traveller’s Tales has crafted a wonderful platformer that stands on its own – though the Lego charm and a great license make it even better. [Excerpt]

Lego Lord of the Rings is a broad fusion of many elements – exploration, collection, combat, puzzle-solving – and Middle-earth is the ideal environment for these things to come together. Despite the kid-friendly exterior, the important events from the story have not been substantially changed or watered down. Epic moments like the swarming mass of orcs at Helm’s Deep, the fall of the Witch King at Pelennor Fields, and Gandalf’s battle with the Balrog are all wonderfully executed and fun to play. The mix of faithfulness and playfulness with the source material makes Lego Lord of the Rings the best video game adaptation of Tolkien’s universe, hands-down.

You don’t need to be a diehard fan to have a good time here. The gameplay supporting the story (which follows the three movies) is fun regardless of your level of Middle-earth expertise. Whether you’re playing in single-player or with a local co-op buddy, the variety is astounding. You still beat up bad guys and collect studs, but that kind of activity occupies a much smaller percentage of the experience. Most of your time is spent exploring the iconic environments, hunting down collectibles, and searching for solutions to puzzles. Combat is still important, but it tends to happen in more impressive ways than enemies mindlessly pouring out of doors. Stomping around as Treebeard, riding into battle as King Théoden, and taking down Oliphaunts are just a few examples of how Traveller’s Tales keeps the action fresh.

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Once the War of the Ring is won, your time with Lego Lord of the Rings is just beginning. The (fairly linear) core campaign is an easily digestible eight hours, but the wealth of open-world, post-game content is staggering. With all of Middle-earth available to explore, the most powerful items, best puzzles, and coolest characters are yours to find – including a bonus level where you control two powerful villains. Obsessive players can expect to spend 30 hours or more to hit 100 percent.

As fun as this game can be, some technical issues get in the way. Character selection bugs, chugging framerates, and screen tearing provide occasional annoyances. The irregular audio quality (the voices are all sampled directly from the films) sometimes makes it seem like the main characters’ dialogue is provided by an Internet soundboard, which deflates some otherwise cool moments.

A handful of technical stumbles can’t keep Lego Lord of the Rings from being the best Lego game so far. Finding a great compromise between the linear installments and the sprawling open world of Lego Batman 2, Traveller’s tales hits sweet spots in the structure and gameplay, constantly giving players new goals and new places to explore. The steady stream of goofball humor keeps the mood light, but almost every part of the game is entertaining in its own way.

An Unlikely Ally

He may seem like a generic orc, but you want to buy the character called Berserker as soon as he is available. Available to use only in Free Play, Berserker is able to pull orange handles and throw bombs that destroy Mithril blockades. These are two obstacles that the characters in standard play can’t overcome, so Berserker will be an early MVP for players who want to hunt down all of the hidden items.

Blog Post: Walking Into Mordor With A Smile

Joe Juba — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:20:00 GMT

[View:1732259907001]

An Unlikely Ally

File: Lego The Lord of the Rings Screens

Joe Juba — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:02:00 GMT