LEGO Lord of the Rings

When the topic of LEGO games comes up, unanimously, I have heard nothing but good things. Therefore, I was pretty excited to see a Lord of the Rings one come out. I have never played any of these, so this would be my first foray into LEGO land.

There is a certain charm to seeing movie scenes play out with LEGO characters, I'll give it that, but the actual gameplay sadly wasn't really all that fun. Leaving the Shire, there wasn't really anything to do. You just follow the blue stud trail to your next destination. You can mosey around and beat the hell out of random rocks and plants so little LEGO studs come out, but since that is not fun, I just left. After you're out of the Shire, the four hobbits meet up, and you can control each of them. Considering they're LEGO people and very similar looking, I couldn't tell who the hell was who. This was only really a problem with the hobbits since the others are fairly distinct with their beards, blonde hair, or dwarfism.

Each character has unique abilities that you use to get around blockages and solve puzzles. These unique abilities are a little weird though... Merry can fish, Pippin can collect water in his bucket... Sorry to break it to you, Pip, that was a pity ability. Any motherfucker can do that. No one's playing you. Sam's abilities are more prolific. He can dig shit up, start fires, and grow plants. However, I kind of had a problem accepting the use of these abilities during gameplay and especially during combat. No problem was ever solved in Lord of the Rings by digging holes or fishing. Problems were solved by stabbing it right in the problem.

I encountered more brain resistance when I came across any side quest. While in Bree, for example, some guy had apparently lost his cooking pot and would be ever so grateful if we went back out in the woods and found it. Umm...no. There's a sense of urgency to this tale. We gotta go meet Gandalf at the Prancing Pony. No way I'm traipsing back in the woods to look for some asshole's cooking pot. In that same vein, I ran across an Uruk-hai that lost his weapon and wanted me to find it. Heeeelllll no. How about I try to kill you instead?

Pity...it won't let me. Whatever, I'm still not looking for your shit, and even if I happen to run across it, I'm not bringing it back. Deal with it.

I skipped quite a bit, actually. There are many side quests, items, and collectibles that you can't even get until your second playthrough. Each level has items that are unreachable unless you have a certain character with you. For example, Gimli's special ability is to break cracked LEGO tiles. These tiles exist throughout the game, even in places where Gimli never actually was, like Osgiliath. You'd have to play Osgiliath again after it's been unlocked, bringing Gimli the second time. Fuck that shit.

There's a lot of that though. I played through the main storyline completely, and at the end, it said I had only completed 24% of the game. I'm only a completist when I'm enjoying myself. 24% is just fine when I'm not.

Now hold on, I wasn't hating my life the entire time. I did quite enjoy the Helms Deep section. There were lots of orcs to kill, and you had to keep the different ladders off the walls in different ways which kept it interesting. Some you had to shoot down, others you smashed, so you had to switch between Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli. It was also kind of cool to use the tossing a person mechanic to throw Gimli across at the orcs carrying the battering ram, just like in the movie. The "LEGO humor" was pretty good in this section as well. I remember specifically enjoying that when they were bracing the gate with various things, they pushed a piano in front of the doors. Being an ent and smashing the shit out of Saruman's machinations was also quite enjoyable. Hooray for joy!

For the most part though, I was just waiting for it to be over. It was very repetitive overall. Once you figured out what to do, you had to do it like 12 more times. I was going through the motions for most of the game. I know these LEGO games skew younger, but I had heard all these positive things from grown ass people. I've now decided that they're all liars.

Saints Row 2

Welp, I did this in the totally wrong order... I played Saints Row 3 first, then Saints Row 4, and now Saints Row 2. While it seems a stupid way to have played it, I'm glad I did it this way because 2 would have never hooked me on the franchise like 3 did. I very well could have tried this game and not come back to the franchise. Not that it was bad...it just wasn't great.

My first issue was a technical one. This was an Xbox game originally, ported to PC. My copy I got from Steam had a known flaw in which everything was sped up to an uncontrollably fast tempo. I spent about 5 minutes attempting to just drive a car around, accidentally crashing into everything, and wondering why everything looked like an episode of Benny Hill. To fix it, I had to download some files to shove in the game folder and edit the speed to something tolerable.

After that was out of the way, the theme to this playthrough was "Man, I'm glad that's better in 3." Granted, if I'd played this one first, I wouldn't know what I was missing...in the future...

Anyway, there were plenty of these moments:

THE PIDLY STUFF

1. There is a mechanic where you can tag walls with some Saints graffiti. You have to spray within the lines, and if you go too far outside the lines, the tag fails, and you can try again. It's lame and not fun, and it would have been better if they'd just say Press "E" to tag like the photo-ops and whatnot in the later game.

2. That lovely mechanic in which you can jump through a windshield to hop in a car is not in this game. I'd run full speed at a car and just bounce off and roll on the ground, forgetting that I have to stop the car like civilized folks before I jack it. Lame.

3. The stores that are for sale are not shown as For Sale on the map like they are in 3. I only bought stores that I happened to see had a For Sale sign as I drove by. Pretty sure I missed 60% of them.

4. In this same vein, there's no way to know how much a place costs without going there. I took many wasted trips to a $50,000 crib that my broke ass couldn't afford at the time.

5. The ability to get your cash from anywhere via your phone was a wonderful addition to 3 because in 2, you have to go to one of your cribs and find the little money icon, which brings me to my next complaint...

THE FUCKING ANNOYING STUFF

6. Horrible level design... I could not find anything in my larger cribs, most frustratingly, my money stash. Sometimes I'd drive to my shithole crib just because it was only one room, and I wouldn't get lost in it. Bad level design was a problem in many of the mission locations, where you'd have to go through multiple floors of a building. The worst of these was a mall. Like a real mall, I couldn't find what I wanted, and I couldn't find a way out. I probably spent 20 minutes trying to get out of that place one time.

7. This could have been avoided if at the end of a mission I was just whisked to the front door of the building. I wouldn't mind. Truly. I don't need to walk down 30 flights of stairs to get out of this high rise. I walked up here, and it was much more entertaining on that trip because I was shooting people along the way, and as such, I was too preoccupied to take notes on how to get back out.

8. Fall damage is ridiculously high. I know jumping off stairs would probably break my legs for real real, but you're also allowing me to get shot like 27 times before I die. Give me some slack, man. Sometimes you gotta jump off a building.

9. I'm forced to do the side activities in order to gain enough respect to unlock missions. I don't know if this was removed in the next game, but I never encountered it as problem because I gladly played those side activities. Not so here because...

10. The activities all kind of suck, and to make things worse, each activity location has 6 levels of that one activity. I don't want to play the same bullshit 6 times in a row... Shit can stay incomplete. I ain't care.

THE "IT IS WHAT IT IS" STUFF

11. Saints Row 2 is a little more serious than the later titles. The over the topness is one of the things I adore about its sequel, so this tamer incarnation isn't exactly gripping. Yeah, my character's a bad motherfucker, but I prefer my bad motherfuckers with a side of humor.

12. Continuing with the lack of over the topness, there's no big set pieces or big built up boss fights. They all kind of fizzle out, and they're not very interesting. I shoot through a bunch of guys to get to the main guy who is pretty much just like those regular guys except it takes a couple more slugs to put him down.

13. And when they did have a different mechanic, they were usually obnoxious in some way. Example: While fighting Veteran Child, who was using Shaundi as a human shield, you had to huck flashbangs at him to get him away from her and THEN shoot him. The obnoxious part was that he would step away from her occasionally without flashbang, and he would be invincible during that period. Why do?!

14. Voice acting. In Saints Row 3, I loved Laura Bailey voicing my main character. She was great throughout and made me laugh out loud plenty. Saints Row 2 voice actor...eehhhh...it was fine. Not too many laughs, just your standard hard ass chick.

THE ACTUALLY GOOD STUFF

15. There were a couple missions that really were impactful. The loss of an important character, the creative takedown of an enemy's main squeeze... Those few memorable moments drew me in and made me more invested in finishing the game.

16. I got to see the introduction of Pierce and Shaundi, who I love in the following game. They're not quite fully formed characters in this one, but you can see the beginnings of their eventual personalities.



So yeah...there was way more bad than good, but whatever lessons they took from making this game, they obviously used them to improve the next one, so kudos. The moral of today's story is, if you're gonna Saints Row, just start with 3. You'll thank me.