![]() ![]() Years later, TT Games only really flexed its muscles when it came to make its Lego Harry Potter games, and built a miniature version of Hogwarts for players to explore. ![]() Look back at the Lego series' origins and you'll see titles made up of story-centric levels and very little else - the ageing Lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones entries, for example, which used their off-mission locations as little more than menus. These are not new ideas, but have been a long time coming. Lego The Hobbit (and Lord of the Rings, to a lesser degree) deserve credit for bringing a number of new systems to the series for the first time - chains of side-quests, crafting, resource-farming and a huge inventory of items to play around with. In terms of locations themselves, the game's sprawling versions of Rivendell and Hobbiton are stand-out highlights, while players will keep coming back to the moody, always-raining town of Bree as their base for upgrades and other operations. There's even a few digs at nice-but-dim Orlando Bloom. Want to play as Jackson himself via his carrot-chomping cameo? You can do that too. Want to go hang out with Tom Bombadil on a farm in a remote corner of the Shire? You can do that. Through dense forests and over blizzard-topped mountains, down into hidden caves and secret-filled glens, the game's world is a beautiful, detailed and slightly cheeky love letter to Peter Jackon's films and Tolkien lore in general. From the polished floors of Bag End to the shining treasure hoard hidden under The Lonely Mountain, The Hobbit lets you roam far and wide. The game's highlight is your ability to explore the entirety of The Hobbit's Middle Earth at whim - that fantastic, iconic map I remember poring over in a paperback years ago. But the series is changing - to the point where the game's scripted story missions are now just a small part of the full experience on offer. There's much that TT Games could work on and improve. The criticisms levelled at it in Eurogamer's review are fair and, perhaps, overdue. Let's be clear - if you are tired of the Lego franchise's formulaic approach to individual level design then it is unlikely that Hobbit (or any other recent entry in the series) is about to win you back. And amongst 2014's games, Lego: The Hobbit's version of Middle Earth was a guilty pleasure of a world that I kept going back to. TT Games' Lego franchise has never had the same scope for creativity as the original toy - and for that there's now Minecraft - but the series is starting to match the imagination of Lego fans via the complex worlds it now offers up for exploration. My younger self would hungrily build sets received at birthdays and Christmas, then quickly repurpose their parts for far grander designs: studded brick landscapes that stretched from living room wall to kitchen door. My love of Lego as a child has stuck with me ever since. ![]()
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