1. SpiderHyphenMan
2.
The Birdcage3.
Lego Lord of the Rings: only the second Lego game I've ever played and now I'm comfortable with their schtick I was able to get through it with much less hassle than previously. There's very good use of the license made here with the entire film trilogy adapted with the usual Lego charm and the original voice lines from the films. All the characters are present and correct and the various abilities and whatnot make sense in context. It gets repetitive of course but it's still good fun to blast through the campaign.
The structure of the game's interesting with an overworld you can wander around in plus the actual instanced levels that you go through the advance the plot. Both are stuffed full of collectibles and puzzles and whatnot, some of which require abilities you won't have in your first playthrough.
Which is probably my biggest issue here: it's unavoidable that you'll need to do everything twice in order to get everything. I realise this is a staple of the Lego games but I don't feel any of it's interesting enough to make that much fun and I couldn't be fucked with it. I did go back through some of the open world sections mopping stuff up because fast travel makes that painless, but there's no way I was going through a load of levels I'd already played just to smash open a load of artificial barriers (which is all these things really are).
The other off-putting thing is just the sheer hilarious plethora of stuff you're expected to collect. Characters (almost all pointless), silver bricks, red bricks, blacksmith plans, Mithrill objects (also almost all pointless), silver chest things (not even sure what these are for) and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. You'd need to be some kind of self-hating masochist to even attempt all of it which makes me want to do none of it. And none of it's helped by the fact that the 'platforming' involved in getting some of the silver bricks is frustrating as shit. Indeed I'd go as far as calling it bugged in places, especially stuff involving Legolas on rope lines and thin platforms, as a couple of them I wrote of as genuinely impossible due to character falling through platforms or just refusing entirely to engage with them.
So, a fun thing to blast through but you need to be pretty disciplined at ignoring all the bullshit they've stuffed in there. I've got Lego The Hobbit to play at some point as well so I'll be interested to see how they compare.