3/5 ★ – Endless_backlog's review of Lego The Hobbit.

9hrs The first thing to address in the Lego hobbit is the fact that it is an unfinished game in the eyes of fans of the franchise. The game only covers the first two movies and has not even seen a DLC for the Battle of the Five Armies since its release 10 years ago. This results in what feels like padding with a lot of levels that aren’t key to the films and don’t actually offer additional value or novelty to the game. The fantastic battle scenes from the third movie could have offered several better options and provide a better conclusion to the story instead of a silly cliff hanger. The Hobbit is like any other Lego game and you’ll spend your time doing similar things as before such a breaking items, building new ones and collecting studs. What it does offer new (except for in the Lego movie game I believe?) is a new crafting system. You will be required to collect specific items in your environment which you will use at certain moments to build a piece of equipment. This is done cleverly as you enter a new display of a Lego blueprint and have to choose the correct Lego piece out of a wheel of options to construct it. Making too many incorrect guesses will fail the task although it is very easy to complete even for kids. I did also like that you have a group of useful squad members who are given some life to the characters of the film. Dori uses a grapple hook to pull things down, Ori uses a slingshot to hit targets and Dwalin knocks large items into place with his hammer. There’s also several great settings such as the Trolls in the woods, the spiders in the forest and of course the mountain. The murmuring of old is also replaced here with voice acting pulled from the movie. All in all Lego the hobbit is good in moments if you are a fan of the movies although it definitely could have had better level design. I personally felt it ran out of steam about 2/3 of the way through and it became a bit of a slog to finish, although the last mission at least was a fun finale.