Lego The Hobbit review: it’s hard to take a Thorin Oakenshield minifig seriously

Lego The Hobbit is a Lego game based on The Hobbit movies, as you may have guessed, but don’t you go running into the stores to see if Bard the Bowman, heir of Dale, strikes Smaug with the last black arrow just yet.

In view of not encouraging spoiler-induced suicides all over the world, Lego The Hobbit walks players only through the first two movies: An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug. Now, these movies are great, practically epic beyond compare, as I’ve come to expect from the Lord of the Rings series. But compared to both the movies it’s based off and the Lego games that have preceded it, Lego The Hobbit just falls short.

It looks boring

There are several reasons for Lego The Hobbit not passing muster in my eyes. Firstly, it’s visually unappealing. I mean, I play Lego games for the Lego bits. For the brightly-colored bricks of my childhood. But Lego The Hobbit doesn’t have any environments that can be built realistically enough with just bricks. It’s all about caves and dirt and grass and Hobbits and Dwarves, and in the case of the elves in Mirkwood, dying trees, more dirt, maybe a little water.

What made the last Lego game we played so good was how nearly everything was made out of brightly-colored bricks. It was great to look at, and satisfying to break apart. In Lego The Hobbit, not do you only have to deal with a color palette with the variety of mud and lichen, you also spend a lot of time wandering through caves and fields and other un-Lego-ey places. You do get stuff to bash up, but for the most part, things don’t look like they’re made out of Lego bricks.

(See: The Lego Movie Videogame (PS4) review: everything is awesome when you’re part of a team)

That’s not Lego-ey at all. And don’t we play these games because we want to see Lego bricks?

Minifigs lack epicness

The thing is, The Hobbit films are just too serious and epic to turn into a proper Lego game. You’ve got Thorin pining for his rightful throne in Erebor, you’ve got Orcs waiting to swallow your guts after they dig them out of your belly. There’s just no space in The Hobbit films for any sort of the lighthearted dialogue previous Lego games are known for.

And two-dimensional minifig faces just don’t cut it for a game based off movies that cover a boundless spectrum of emotion ranging from the loss of an ancestral home to interspecies romance. I weep at the thought of Thorin’s magnificent black mane constricted into a soulless Lego hairpiece.

Fans will love the game experience