Let's get this out of the way -- with two exceptions, I'm a total fanboy of Traveler's Tales LEGO games. The exceptions are
Bionicle, which was incredibly boring and repetitive, and
LEGO Indiana Jones 2, which tried to introduce a large-scale hub, but failed miserably by making map locations look too similar to each other, hiding many of the story locations and
by not providing a map that could be referenced to find the various story locations for free play mode. (TT fixed the large-scale hub mechanic beautifully in
LEGO The Lord of the Rings.)
I've put about ten hours into
LEGO The Hobbit, and my impressions are favorable, though they've changed the approach significantly from
LOTR. The biggest thing you will notice is that the hub area does not allow you to change up the members of your party as you can if you choose to replay a level in Free Play mode. I'm sure this opens up once you've completed the story, but it is a change that's a bit hard to get used to. I'm sure TT chose to do this in order to keep the story's continuity, and after mentally fighting it for a few hours, I've come to like and even embrace the approach. I'm about one-third of the way through the story at this point and as a result of this I have none of the red bricks that allow you to turn on the game's Extras. (Extras are power-ups and cheats, essentially, that allow you to earn the game's stud currency at amazing rates, give you hints regarding upgrade and quest items, and other goodies.)
If you played
LEGO LOTR, then many of the locations will be familiar, since this prequel story takes place in the same Middle Earth as
LOTR, but decades earlier. But, as you would expect, there are differences. For example: one of the puzzle caves in
LOTR that was dark and cobweb-filled, is fresh and bright in
Hobbit.
Like
LOTR, you have a large number of side-quests where people ask you to craft them various mithral items, but there are additional quests where you are asked to bring back assorted treasures found in the story levels. Each of the game's sixteen levels has four treasures to be found, along with a hidden set of blueprints and the requisite ten MiniKit pieces. Many of the treasures can be used by your characters to give them abilities they wouldn't normally have, like the mithral items that can be crafted.
Crafting in
Hobbit is a much larger game element than it was in
LOTR. All of the mithral items that you can create in the Bree forge now require several other materials in addition to mithral bricks. These new materials -- there appear to be over a dozen different types of them -- are gathered throughout the game by smashing objects and then walking or jumping to them like you do with studs. The forge has a new build mechanic where button presses fly into a set of concentric circles and you must time your presses to match when the button icons hit the inside of the circles. Hitting the outside ring will yield a "good" item, but hitting the innermost ring every time will yield a "perfect" item. I've only crafted perfect items so far -- it's not hard to do -- so I'm not sure what the difference is.
But wait, there's even more crafting using these new items: scattered throughout the game, both in the hub and in the story levels, are build-it challenges that require a variety of materials including jewels, lumber, rope, stone, fish and other foodstuffs. These build-it challenges use the same "match the needed item from the build ring" mechanic that was introduced in
The LEGO Movie Videogame.
Hobbit is
big, residing on the same hub area as
LOTR. So far the stories are engaging, the puzzles interesting and occasionally frustrating, as is typical of TT games. There are a few puzzles where getting a mithral brick
requires that your character be destroyed, dumping a thousand or so of your accumulated studs on a floor full of spikes. Similarly, there are a few puzzles where, as far as I can tell, you are required to plug in a second controller in order to solve them -- places where one player must stand on a pressure plate while another crosses a spear-encrusted threshold, for example. Just having a player stand on a pressure plate and then switching characters won't work because you get far enough from the pressure plate to cause the first character to follow you, releasing the deadly spikes.
Overall, this is a fun addition to the LEGO family and Traveler's Tales has introduced a few new gameplay ideas to keep the game fresh. While I haven't completed it yet, I give it a strong recommendation for anyone that's a fan of the franchise.
