If you've been introduced to the works of Tolkien by the Lord of the Rings
movies, you may be surprised to learn that the book that originally started it
all was written as a children's story. The developers of The Hobbit have
stayed true to the spirit of the book by giving the game a look and feel with
which kids will readily identify. A cartoon-like Bilbo inhabits a colorful
and cute world and the gameplay is straight out of the kind of video game
platformer with which kids are all intimately familiar. If you're looking
for a game set in the dark, dangerous, and dramatic Middle Earth of the films
then you'll more than likely be let down by The Hobbit. On the other hand,
if you don't mind the videogame play and graphics you'll be rewarded with a
game that manages to be a pretty average platformer despite the power of
Tolkien's storytelling.
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| Meet Bilbo. |
For those of you unfamiliar with The Hobbit, the story follows the
adventures of Bilbo Baggins after he is recruited by the wizard Gandalf to aid a
group of dwarves in retrieving their treasure from the evil dragon Smaug. The
game’s levels are set in the book’s major locations as our heroes make their way
from Hobbiton to the Lonely Mountain. Events from the book are depicted through cutscenes and sketch drawings between the
levels, but once you take control of Bilbo you become involved in standard
platform jump puzzles and fetch it quests. For example, the game opens in
Hobbiton as the party prepares to leave on their journey to Lonely Mountain. The
pending expedition serves as an excuse to send you scurrying about collecting
provisions for the trip. Of course the provisions that you need are all in the
hands of various hobbits who will ask you to do them a favor before they hand
anything over. These all involve your fetching an item or solving a simple
puzzle, which invariably require you to do a lot of jumping and looking behind
trees and buildings.
The Hobbit is a collection of just about every element typically found in
platform games. There are coins scattered around the land that can be
exchanged for health potions and similar such items between levels, and gems
that can be gathered to increase Bilbo's hit points. There are
stealth-based sequences that are exercises in pattern recognition performed with
one finger on the "sneak" key. Expect to do even more sneaking around
once you acquire the Ring and its power of invisibility. And, of course,
there are the aforementioned puzzles and jump sequences. The puzzles are
of the flip the switch, find the item, move the box variety, so they won't
provide much of a mental workout. The jumping sequences are made more
challenging than need be by the game's camera. It will often swing to the
wrong angle or perch itself at a spot that makes it tough to judge your next
jump. All of these elements are pretty much standard platform fare, and
are not particularly challenging or exciting. It's not that they are
poorly implemented, it's that they are all generic and derivative. There's
just nothing here that you haven't done many times before.
The game takes Bilbo's role as the group's "burglar" to heart by throwing
locked chests into the game. In order to open the chests you'll need to
complete time-based reaction mini-games that involve hitting the button when
various gears and wheels align. It's interesting enough at first but grows
to be a repetitive exercise as you move deeper into the game.
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