The Hobbit can be enjoyable for a while, but in the end it's lacking that Tolkien magic that would make it a great game.
Gameplay
The game basically plays out like an action adventure game, with slight platformer roots. You play as Bilbo, the hobbit that started the LoTR story so long ago. You are basically playing through the entirety of the book, using Bilbo to move around a map and accomplish certain tasks. This can range from rescuing party members to retrieving items to solving puzzles, to defeating boss enemies. Bilbo starts out with only pebbles and his walking stick to defend him, but about halfway through he receives Sting, the sword he will carry throughout the game. He also receives the legendary One Ring at one point, which you will use throughout the rest of the game to hide from enemies and sneak around. Bilbo also can gain life bubbles through collecting courage points, little diamond like objects you find floating around or recieve from defeating enemies. It's a little bit of a cross between Zelda and Final Fantasy. Bilbo can also pick up new techniques for his sword, staff and rocks along the way. Taking another key from Zelda, Bilbo can learn spin and jump attacks from these techniques for both his sword and staff.
The main fallacy of the gameplay is the fact that it's just too easy. There are rarely moments of frustration. Most enemies are quite easy to defeat. The tasks assigned during gameplay have you whisking back and forth across the level, which can get monotonous but aren't entirely horrible. The "lock picking" puzzles are also too easy, and don't generally increase with difficulty that much. The most frustrating enemies are the poisonous spiders, but if you jump a lot and find something to block them, you can take them out easily. Boss enemies are easily fooled as well, since enemies apparently can't climb well, leaving you opportunities for finding ledges and picking them off with stones or attacking and then retreating. One of the saddest examples is during a boss fight with a giant undead skeleton. Enemies respawn until you defeat the boss, but by simply running around them in circles until they get close together, then lobbing a few stones at the boss until they get to close or jumping in with a sword slam attack, you can whittle the boss's health away easily. PLUS, health mushrooms spawn continually, meaning that you can easily recover by just running away for a few seconds until they respawn again. This seems to cheapen the challenge of the level. The most disappointing factor in the game is the last level, which doesn't even end in a boss fight, but instead a wimpy race around an area to activate barrels. The stealth phases are also too easy. If you are patient, there is next to no danger of being caught, because all of your enemies have predictable patterns.
At least you've got a decent variety of techniques to use and areas to explore. Each area is pretty different and interesting, no repetitive level designs. The levels are pretty big as well, meaning you'll get to explore a lot. However, there are definite problems with the camera that frustrate. Many times it's uncooperative and you can end up looking inside Bilbo instead of where you need to. It also refuses to stay directly above your character, frustrating if you're trying to estimate jump distance overhead.
Another thing about the levels is that there are just too many save points. You'll literally be tripping over save points, as there are most likely 15 or so in each level, which allows for no sense of death being dangerous.
This is also the first game I've found for the cube where I actually had to RESTART THE CONSOLE because of a glitch. I've never ever had that happen to me, and there were other points in the game that felt glitchy overall. The game would suddenly halt as well because of the need to transition directly in the middle of gameplay into a new section of level. There's no reason whatsoever that I can see where this would be necessary. Windwaker could allow you to sail across a HUGE sea without any load time between sections, there was no reason for these.
Graphics
They're fair at best. Definitely not the best of what the cube has to offer. They match the overall lightheartedness of the story, but there are some ugly character models and the prerendered cut scenes are definitely not up to par as they should be. If you compare the cut scenes to the actual game graphics of something like Baten Kaitos or Metroid Prime, you can see how poor these cut scene graphics actually are. The worst model I've seen is probably Bard. He looks like something out of the N64 era.
Sound
The orchestral background music is very pretty and nice to listen to, however, it doesn't transition easily, and I've found it to be glitchy a lot of the time, with the wrong music playing at some points. Plus, I personally hated the voice acting. It seemed overplayed a lot, especially some horrible dialogue said by NPCs. Bilbo's voice acting is probably the best in the game, and after that Smaug, whose voice was perfect for this role.
Value
Overall, you can buy a lot better games for the cube than this. It wasn't all that long, the levels were too easy, and the game end was a real letdown. Buy Windwaker or another adventure game. Tolkien fans might get something out of this, but there are other LoTR games that you'd probably appreciate more than this.