Review of LEGO: The Hobbit

Taking advantage of Steam's weekend deal, I bought LEGO: The Hobbit for less than EUR4 and gave it a test run. Having seen the trilogy, I wanted to see how it felt. The game begins telling the story of how the dwarfs lost the Mountain to Smaug the Fire Dragon, so it extends the story a bit by giving us an idea of what happened before. It is also a co-op play with two players, making use of the different characters' unique abilities and also co-operating in overcoming and solving puzzles together. But I got stuck at the first door. I am a first time LEGO player (video game, physical blocks I've played with aplenty) and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Smashing things up didn't seem a good idea (hey, the dwarfs live here, how can they be vandals in their own home??) although while testing out the controls (WASD and UHJK) I did accidentally smash some ornaments. My son was playing the other character and he was getting edgy not knowing what to do. I ended up looking for walkthroughs to get an idea of what I had to do: I DID have to SMASH things.. and then build them back up. I smashed some, but could not figure out how to build. That is until I restarted the game (this time with my daughter as my son went off to play something else), smashed the statues and got rewarded with a jumping ? tile that told me how to build. Eventually I finished the first chapter with my daughter but i have some feedback to share. The game sacrifices consistency with the story for the sake of the LEGO World game mechanics: having Thorin smashing up his kingdom felt really out of place and was afraid that the guards would get me. Indeed, the guards were so off-putting. I'm the King's son for Balin's sake, how dare you point those blades at me? Anyway, the LEGO feel is nice, it's a nice remediation of the real world feel of the trilogy, but the game mechanics... they're too Lego focused: you're smashing things up to gain LEGO pieces that you can rebuild and re-use to solve the puzzles. The mini-games bring the LEGO brick playing back into the game, but only to sacrifice consistency with the story... I look at this as another themed game that sticks to the gameplay while sacrificing narrative consistency.. watch this space for a paper about that :P