It's true, most video games based on insanely popular properties end up stinking. This was true for Fellowship of the Ring, Catwoman, Van Helsing and on and on. The Hobbit, however, is a solid effort at translating Tolkien's famous book into a 3D platformer. Graphically, The Hobbit is a very different game from the other games based on The Lord of the Rings books. EA's games have a very realistic look, and Fellowship just didn't seem to know what kind of look they were going for. The Hobbit has a very consistent, cartoony look that actually works. Bilbo is rendered as his younger self, just as he begins his journey to the Lonely Mountain. I liked the colorful palette that was used to create Bilbo and his surroundings. It was a nice change of pace from the dark tones used in EA's games based on the movies. All of the environments are nicely done many different textures are used throughout. Bilbo's enemies are interesting as well, and all have a very distinct look. I found the sounds and voice acting in The Hobbit to be top-notch. While there aren’t any big names voicing the characters for this game, all of the characters sound pretty much like you’d expect them to. You have the gravely Gandalf, a youthful accented Bilbo and the gruff dwarves all sounding great. The music is colorful and suits each level appropriately. The sound effects for combat and item collecting aren’t particularly unique but serve their purpose. On the whole I enjoyed the many sounds and voices in The Hobbit. On the gameplay front, things take a dip downward. The action is rather slowly paced, with some of the game focused on stealth and puzzle solving with the rest on battling foes 1-3 at a time. Sometimes you face much larger groups, especially against the spiders. Seeing as how combat consists of over half of the gameplay you’d think more time would have been spend polishing it up. You have a simple combo system and a small variety of weapons to choose from. It seems that there are some collision problems, as you don’t always make contact even when it seems you are in range. The lock-on system didn’t work well for me either. It seemed I had better luck taking on foes one-on-one if I didn’t use the lock on at all. It keep taking me in directions I didn’t want to go and slowing down my attacks. You eventually learn what your most effective weapon is and will just start button mashing to get through the fights. The game is fairly linear and doesn’t allow for much exploration of each level. The levels are really, really long as well and you’ll be thankful for the many save points scattered along your route. I found the puzzles to be engaging enough and at just the right difficultly that I wasn’t stumped for too long before moving on. The boss fights are fun and challenging. I really enjoyed battling the large spiders bosses, it was a long fight with many different strategies involved. The biggest detractor for The Hobbit is the camera. You have control over the camera and can swing it around for any view you want. But, the camera has a mind of it’s own when you are moving or hugged up against a wall. It will rotate straight overhead to the next most unusable angle possible. This will cause you many deaths as you try to snake around cliff walls or past enemies and just can’t see where you are going due the camera. It would have been nice if you could just control the camera completely, regardless of what kind of obstacle you are next to. This was my main frustration throughout the entire game. However, on the whole I really enjoyed The Hobbit. The cut scenes that looked like illustrations from a book, the voice acting and the combat were all a lot of fun. And finally getting to play through a 3D version of one of my favorite books was the icing on the cake.
One of the best aspects about this game is that we get to see and move around in the same world and scenarios as we read in the book. As I played, I kept thinking how well-rounded the production seemed to be. I really ... Read Full Review
This is actually the prequel to the Lord of the Rings, so what The hell I figured I would pick it up along with all the other titles. You can get them all at bargain basement prices these days. I would then go right thr... Read Full Review
