Rating of
2.5/5
There and Ba– No, Just There
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/12/26
“LEGO: The Hobbit” (“LTH”) is one of many, many parody games blending the world of LEGO building toys with popular media. The studio behind this series is Traveler’s Tales, once a stand-alone publisher in its own right after its founding in 1987, but currently a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Games, hence the ability to churn out endless spoofs of movies for which Warner Bros. already owns the IP rights. Released in 2014, shortly before the release of the third and final entry in Peter Jackson’s unnecessarily-bloated “The Hobbit” trilogy of films, “LTH” was supposed to deliver a fully-featured send-up of Jackson’s overly-pretentious adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s debut light novel (plus a butt-load of extraneous material sourced from Tolkien’s short stories). While I have personally never taken particular interest in the ‘LEGO’ parody games, I did (and still do) have a huge collection of LEGO Bricks as a kid, and enjoyed building my own little fantasy and sci-fi worlds. When “LTH” and “LEGO: Lord of the Rings” were given away for free on Steam, however, I couldn’t resist claiming them for my library, and when Chris and I found ourselves in dire lack of decent 2-player local coop games, we decided we might as well give this one a shot. Unfortunately, ‘LEGO’ games don’t really embody the creativity of the original LEGO Bricks, and considering them parodies or satires requires and overly-generous application of those terms.
Presentation
All of the ‘LEGO’ spoof games by Traveler’s Tales are built in the same proprietary game engine. It looks okay, and does a decent job of simulating the plasticky, inorganic style of everything LEGO, but at this point in time, it’s starting to feel a bit long in the tooth. There are noticeable jaggies, and the only reason there aren’t blurry textures is the fact that LEGO objects are supposed to be shiny, smooth, and unrealistic. Option menus feel threadbare and sometimes a bit buggy.
The game’s audio is its true claim to fame, as it uses dialog and soundtrack music ripped directly from the Warner Bros. films it’s based on. So it DOES actually have the real cast of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” including SIR Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Martin Freeman as Bilbo, WITHOUT having to pay their outrageous salaries for dedicated voiceacting. Instead, the game’s cutscenes are simply spoofs of scenes from the movies, with the visuals replaced by animated LEGO minifigs who deliver their lines with the same gravity as their live-action counterparts, only accompanied by a plethora of background sight-gags.
Technically, “LTH” is pretty solid. We only experienced a couple of crashes (one very early on while adjusting the game’s display options before starting), and the auto-save feature is pretty diligent, so losing progress was never a big concern. The game supports Xinput controllers out of the box, and supports drop-in/drop-out local coop that ‘just works.’ Indeed, the game is designed around having two (or more) partners working together, so even in single-player mode, there’s another computer controlled ally active at any given time. Players can freely switch between a varying group of active characters during any given point of the story, while revisiting completed stages allows players to bring ANY of their recruited allies into a situation. Unfortunately, replaying stages is absolutely necessary, as the game is purposefully built with hidden goodies and obstacles that can’t be navigated by the ‘main’ team that originally played through the level, which I found absolutely aggravating and horribly designed.
Story
All of the problems with “LTH’s” story and narrative are the same problems with Peter Jackson’s bloated adaptation of a children’s novel into THREE three-hour movies. There’s a lot of padding, and the pacing drags... but ultimately, the main path through the game is fairly short.
We get the introduction of Bilbo and Gandalf in The Shire. The 13 dwarves descend upon Bilbo’s house and eat all his food. The group departs on their adventure. There are flashbacks detailing how the dwarves lost their kingdom. There are unnecessarily-long travel montages and interludes. There’s Goblin Town and Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum. There’s a barrel ride. There’s Lake Town. There’s the burglarizing of Smaug’s lair... but that’s it. If you’re familiar with “The Hobbit” at all, this is all old-hat material, and if you – like me – don’t think “The Hobbit” is all it’s cracked up to be, this game won’t do anything to change that view.
Indeed, the original light novel the films are based on had the alternative title, “There and Back Again,” and was alleged to be a first-hand account written by Bilbo himself. Unfortunately, with Peter Jackson stretching the movie release into a trilogy spread out over three years, “LTH” was forced out the door without an ending. While Traveler’s Tales was working on a DLC that would cover the events of “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies,” it was ultimately canceled, leaving the game with NO actual ending resolution. The final boss battle against Smaug just covers him in gold and pisses him off, and we don’t even get as far as Bard shooting the dragon down into the lake before the credits roll.
“LTH” took us about 11 hours to get through in 2 player coop. Some of that time was spent in the fool’s errand of trying to clear the entire overworld of breakable objects before we realized that said breakable objects respawn after just a few minutes. Even more unfortunately, “LTH” is, apparently, the first ‘LEGO’ game to adopt open-world Sandbox paradigms, populating an enormous world map with dozens of green dots where some minor side character (not voiced by the original movie audio) wants some help with something stupid.
Between the necessary repetition of the story stages and a world map completely overstuffed with banal fetch-questing, “LTH” is actually one of the worst Sandbox games I’ve personally experienced, both from a narrative and gameplay perspective.
Gameplay
Chris has played a lot more of these ‘LEGO’ spoof games than I have, and, according to him, they’re all very much the same. “LTH” is a fairly basic hybrid of 3D Platforming and Beat ‘em Up, with the occasional LEGO brick-themed puzzle blocking the player’s path. It’s a stage-based game, where each stage entry is plopped in a vast, open overworld, with blue breadcrumbs leading the player from one section of the story to the next. Each stage has a number of hidden collectibles (which can be combined to build various LEGO objects), as well a specific number of coins/studs that need to be collected in order to reach ‘Master Burglar’ status.
Unfortunately, most of the collectibles can’t be collected by the default team of characters that plays through each stage on the initial run through the story, requiring revisiting stages and swapping through the overly-large stable of optional characters, many of whom don’t become available until late-game or via a special password in the options menu. The open world is so large and sprawling, that finding the entrances to stages without the breadcrumb trail is tedious. Even worse, the fast travel system is incredibly limited and cumbersome, plus some missions require ‘sleeping’ at a camp site to change from day to night or vice-versa. Many early NPC fetch quests involve mechanics that the player will absolutely not have access to at the time of discovery, and the amount of “stuff” just starts to feel overwhelming very quickly. People love to complain that Ubisoft Sandbox games just vomit icons all over the map... but at least the player can usually deal with whatever they find at those icons as they come across them, instead of having to put a pin in EVERYTHING until much, much later.
As far as I’m concerned, the gameplay in “LTH” is so incredibly mediocre and bland that I couldn’t really get excited about the prospect of replaying any of the stages, let alone ALL of them. In my estimation, all of these ‘LEGO’ games seem to be the kind of low-energy time-wasters that one can play with a young child without having to worry about anything being too complex... yet the open world in “LTH” with all of its accouterments is not only complex but exhausting.
Overall
If you think “The Hobbit” light novel is the pinnacle of Western Fantasy fiction, if you think dumb sight-gags are the pinnacle of satire and parody, and if you don’t mind your movie-trilogy game not including anything from the third movie – or an ending of any kind, you’ll probably like “LEGO: The Hobbit.” But if your standards are a bit higher than that, you’ll probably find the game as bland, mediocre, and repetitive as I did. I didn’t absolutely hate it, and Chris and I will be playing through “LEGO: The Lord of the Rings” at some point (because I also got it for free on Steam), but this is definitely not the type of gaming experience that should get people excited.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
