LEGO® The Hobbit™

Unless you get this game at a steep discount and also do not mind game-breaking bugs and constant glitches, avoid this game even if you like the LEGO franchise. As others have pointed out, the game feels straight-up unfinished. After doing the main quest, you're left thinking "… that's it?" The credits screen comes rolling in completely out of the blue and leaves you hanging on a cliffhanger that never was, and never will be, followed up on. I thought this was a bug until I realized that no, the game actually does end that early. Much of the game is broken. This includes: - Fast travel just freezing you mid-air, quite literally just leaving you hanging - Essential guiding stones not showing up, locking you out of quest collectibles - Enemy death doesn't always register and gets you stuck in infinite combat - Blacksmith forging just stops working at random - Item swap animation cancels out, leaving you completely immobile - Some map direction markers are in the completely wrong spot - Characters glitching out of the map Most of these bugs require you to restart the game, and fairly often at that. A tip for players, though: Turning your video settings down as low as they can go (800x600, lowest refresh rate, VSync locked at 30 Hz) is actually needed to fix some issues that impact quest progression, but this can only be done from the game's main menu. Even playing at 60 Hz and/or 720p is enough to cause game-breaking glitches to happen. 144 Hz is right out; you're likely to get stuck even within 5 minutes. The game also has a lot of character-specific abilities even for a LEGO game. Slingshot switches, arrow targets, hooks, goblin walls, small character tunnels, big character strength, magic objects, Mithril objects, Morgul objects, plants and digging, setting fires, explosive grenades, elven abilities, dark areas, sickness, wraith objects, dwarf stacks, hammer smash, cracked plates, belly bouncing, rope slings, fishing, mining, disguises, and even with this list off the top of my head I'm probably still missing some. Free playing levels after the main quest involves so much character swapping and trying to find which character does what in the selector menu that it simply becomes a tedious chore. Especially for Mithril objects where a certain item is required to break them, and any time you character swap the character holding that item, it is unequipped and you have to go find it in your inventory again. Some NPCs will make random remarks when you pass them and it does get a bit annoying after a while, but kudos to whoever came up with the "[spoiler]how long is all of this talk of dragons going to… [i]drag on[/i] for[/spoiler]" line; that one is actually quite fun and is just the perfect level of dry punny humor. :)