Great, ironic Lord of the Rings adaptation

Lego Lord of the Rings is a Lego typical adventure game in which it is necessary to complete 18 levels and a large open world. The story follows this unsurprisingly the film version, the dialogues have been partly taken from the original (but mostly in abbreviated form). If you have mastered English well enough, then necessarily is the original language recommended, as you so comes from the movie to enjoy the original cast. The movie and cutscenes only take a total of about 1.5 hours.

Besides the story mode there is a Free Play mode, where you with all the characters that have been collected up to the time (a total of 85, including at last Tom Bombadil :)), again can play each level. This is necessary to get all the treasures and items that are hidden in a level. In the open world there are plenty of puzzles whose solution usually with Mithril bricks (in previous Lego games, the Gold Bricks were) will be rewarded. These are needed to forge new objects, which in turn then assist in solving puzzles throughout the levels. So overall a motivating concept of hunter-gatherers to play the levels more than once - and who does not want it, nothing missed by the story. Once a level in story mode was completed, it is in freeplay mode. After the story mode you have reached about 30% of the goals achievable.

Graphically backgrounds from the film are used, which are combined with Lego buildings, all of which are kaputtbar. The atmosphere of the film is great captured. At the same time the story is told with a lot of self-irony and small, lovely details and Easter Eggs (eg the success of "Taking the Hobbits to Isengard" on a YouTube hit based) are wonderfully amusing.

After so much positive things also some criticism:

The game is to be activated via Steam (PC version) and therefore bound by activation of the Steam account - may resell it after you unfortunately like so many other games anymore. In two-player mode can be switched between the split screen and dynamic split screen - both not really optimal solution. While everyone can explore the game world on your own, but just the dynamic split screen hampered often as he exploited. Ideal, who with two-player full-screen technology called his own a 3D TV.

To control a joypad is optimal, eg PC - Xbox 360 Controller for Windows, black; the control with the keyboard feels not so natural and catchy as the controller. In general, the controller is ok, sometimes just with some jumping puzzles but rather fieselig and also frustrating when you already falling during the twentieth attempt from the Tower in Isengard, because at the crucial moment a character changing from game is misinterpreted or the camera decides now sometimes just to change the position. Estimate distances and directions is not always easy and often interpret the game the commands as if you wanted to jump the rope and ADVERSE into the abyss quite naturally. There are also some bugs that prevent some to reach 100% Game Core. While here should be improved, but, to date, unfortunately this is not yet done. So annoying bugs, but do not prevent most from completing story mode with substantially no problems.

Conclusion: a few dozen hours of fantastic fun with a few slight weaknesses regarding control and bugs in some places. Highly recommended!