Swinging from one tree branch to the next as an elven prince should feel airy and swift, but here it feels heavy and sluggish. Platforming feels vague thanks to a lack of player shadows and a positively unruly camera, with which you'll fight just as often as any Uruk-hai. This same shoddy craftsmanship is present in nearly every aspect of the experience. Me, I'd rather have had an AI partner that I don't need to fight around for fear of slaying them. If you've always secretly wanted to kill Samwise, you can now do it over and over to your black, shriveled heart's content. You can in LEGO Lord of the Rings, thanks to the presence of friendly fire. It's like a bad ‘80s beat 'em up, except you couldn't accidentally kill your braindead AI partner in those. Not only do enemies fail to react to landed blows, they attack through them, interrupting your offensive and making you take unavoidable damage. Even when it does, the clunky looking combo animations carry you right past your target often, forcing you to miss them entirely and sometimes sending you down one of the games many pits of insta-death. It's kind of sad when all you have to do is mash the attack button over and over, and yet the game still can't read your inputs right. It seems appropriately simple for this style of game and the intended audience, but wonky targeting and criminally unresponsive controls make it a complete chore.
And at its worst, it frustrates, regardless of how young or old you are. But LEGO LOTR makes so many cardinal errors in terms of gameplay that even at its best, it bores. The series has often been quite successful in this endeavor due to both the parity between the colorful source material and the LEGO universe as well as the sturdily designed game mechanics, which while simple enough for young folk to reason out, usually manage to be fun for the parents and older sibling who inevitably get roped into playing. For those late to the party, the LEGO series of games takes popular entertainment franchises like Star Wars or Batmanand attempts to distill them down into charming, LEGO themed puzzle/platformers with a side of action.
0 kommentar(er)
