Following an epic prologue that mirrors the battlefield opening of Peter Jackson's movies, you find yourself in the bucolic idyll of Hobbiton, tiny Lego hobbits scurrying around its rabbit-warren lanes, drinking and dancing at Bilbo's birthday party. Eclipsing even the sprawling virtual Gotham of Lego Batman 2, this game sees Lego embracing the open-world principle in full. TT has risen to the challenge of adapting such a vast saga with characteristic aplomb. A story in which small things turn out to hold great power and small people prove to have enormous courage, the core ideas of inverted scale that have made TT Games' series so popular are woven through Tolkien's tale like strands in elven rope. The Lord of the Rings, it turns out, is the perfect source material for a Lego game.
