The stages in LEGO Batman 2 could drag on forever, turning a small pleasure into a grueling slog.

Lord of the Rings manages to break the LEGO games’ bad habit of overly long story levels too. Need to get rid of that pesky cave troll? First you need to build a little hobbit hole out of fallen blocks to get to the platform above so you can jump on the scaly creep’s back to stab away. Traveller’s Tales has always been adept at creating simple, satisfying cause and effect puzzles to punctuate the base button-mashing fights, and this game has them in spades. From that moment all the way to the climactic scene up on Mount Doom, the game has you slice up orcs and solve simple puzzles to experience the story. That’s par for the story action in LEGO Lord of the Rings. Rather than play out like Peter Jackson’s legendary prologue from Fellowship of the Ring, LEGO throws you into the shoes of the last king of men, Elendil, and tells you to cut on Sauron for a while before the story moves forward. When you fire it up you’re thrust right into the great battle pitting humans and elves against Sauron and his orcs, complete with the same towering, mace-wielding Lord of the rings himself smashing his way through the hordes. The big beats of the game have you play through the iconic (and some not so iconic) action sequences from the movies. Those Tolkien-ites still hankering for a dose of Tom Bombadil will find him here, yellow boots and all. Much like the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Batman, and Indiana Jones LEGO games, Lord of the Rings is predominantly a retelling of the film series, with a smattering of deeper lore tossed in for diehard fans. This is in many ways the best LEGO game yet, held back only by some unnecessary padding and an unusually strict adherence to the source material. What once was lacking in Traveller’s Tales indomitable series of block-based film adaptations has been recognized and accounted for. You can feel it in the earth of LEGO Lord of the Rings, though given the limitations of video game technology, you can’t quite smell it in the air.

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