LEGO Lord of the Rings

It's not only Traveller's Tales' best Lego game yet, but also the best Lord of the Rings game we've seen. A magical, lovingly-crafted take on Tolkien's tale and an excellent video game to boot.

It’s a Lego game, in other words. But it’s bloated, too, full of half-formed, shoddily executed ideas and frustrating glitches. And after years of glacial iteration, surely we have the right to hope new additions will be, if not truly precious, at least a little more refined.

The formula is simply starting to wear a bit thin. For fans of the films, it’s a quality product that does the license justice and likely represents one of the final pop culture spin-offs before the trilogy is finally laid to rest. In the immortal worlds of Gandalf the Grey, you shall not pass…this up.

As a huge LOTR fan, I enjoyed my time with LEGO The Lord of the Rings. It's an interactive guided tour through three incredible films that relives all of the most memorable moments. It lacks some of the unique charm that the series is known for, and the gameplay, while fun at times, is beginning to lose its luster.

The story cinematics might appeal to those who are too young to have seen the films when released, but they still managed to get a solid stream of laughs. All of this together makes it a wonderful experience for new and old fans alike.

It’s probable that Tolkien fans are going to be inundated with games based on The Hobbit for the next few years, but if this is the last Lord of The Rings game to be published for a while, it serves as a fittingly fun capstone to the last decade of video game Ringsmania.

The LEGO video games impressed a lot of us back when LEGO Star Wars first came out. But through the years, the series started settling into a routine, and it wasn’t long before each new addition to the series started feeling like a reskinned version...