Considering the recent
poor quality of licensed games produced by Vivendi/Universal – The
Hulk, War of the Rings – we weren’t
expecting much from The Hobbit and, much to their discredit, they
lived up to our low expectations.

As an action/adventure game, The
Hobbit is a mishmash of genres,
none of which come close to reaching their potential.

Apparently Vivendi has
possession of some long-lost papers of Tolkiens claiming that the
true title of The Hobbit was to be The Hoppit for
our diminutive friend Bilbo Baggins spends much time hopping from
ledge to ledge, leaf to leaf and vine to vine. As if that isn’t
insult enough to Tolkien’s true vision, well, Bilbo has now
been turned into a pint-sized warrior wielding a battle walking stick
with pointed orange hair so he resembles any number of Japanese anime
characters. The Shire and Middle Earth are awash in bright colors,
but everything seems strangely homogenized almost as if the developers
are saying, “This is how we think you want our game to look,
creativity be damned!”

There are enjoyable levels, such as sneaking past a party of Trolls
to retrieve a stolen wallet, but like everything else in this game
the stealth suspense is diluted as every wrong step requires you
to begin again from the start of the level (where you hopefully remembered
to save as, yes, The Hobbit is yet another game with console save
points).

For much of the game the
music consists of annoying, inappropriate guitar or flute riffs
that would be enjoyable if they did not loop
endlessly. Unlike ‘A Mighty Wind’, a movie in which the
folksy guitar music was purposely silly, the score of The Hobbit is somehow meant to reflect an ‘elfish’ or fantasy atmosphere,
but when you are attempting to complete a vine jump for about the
twentieth time, hearing the same riff loop ad nauseum is reason enough
to wish for Biblo to be devoured by the wolves he always seems to
be battling.

After playing a game like Beyond
Good and Evil with its intuitive
controls and jumping sequences that only require you to move the
character in the appropriate direction, consider what one must do
just to complete a long jump in The Hobbit:

Use your Walking-stick to jump farther than normal. First, cycle
to your Walking-stick by pressing the O button. Then get a running
start. When you near the jumping point, hold the L1 button to ready
your Walking-stick and then quickly press the X button to jump.

Believe it or not, this move that reads as though it can only be
accomplished by a contortionist soon becomes second nature as you
have no choice but to jump, jump, jump.

One thing I rarely complain
about is camera angles in a game, but I don’t think I’ve
ever played a game in which it seemed I was constantly adjusting
the camera to get a better view or to
see what jump was needed next. Never have I played a game in which
I had so many bad camera angles as in The Hobbit.

Of course, as this is a platform game that offers nothing original,
there are gems scattered about Middle Earth that Bilbo can collect
to increase his courage. More realistic are the hidden treasure chests,
but there is no strategy involved here either as unlocking them is
simply a matter of pressing your mouse or controller button at the
appropriate moments.

For those who insist that
the very nature of video games demands that a title like The Hobbit
include platform elements well, that’s
hogwash. If younger gamers had the opportunity to be introduced to
adventure elements like exploration and puzzle-solving, instead of
constantly being force-fed a diet of violence and running and jumping
in search of icons or coins they maybe video games wouldn’t
be perceived so negatively by the mainstream press.

Does this game follow
the book? Yes, in the most superficial way possible – Gandalf the Gray is present, Bilbo acquires both
Sting and the One Ring, and faces-off against Smaug the Dragon. The
first chapter of the game – there are eleven chapters total – is
a complete rip-off of last years other Vivendi/Universal LOTR release.
Bilbo must search the town to collect objects and perform fetch-it
missions for the townspeople. While I am a huge advocate of puzzles
and adventure aspects in games, what somnambulist believed that retrieving
apples, playing hide-and-seek or searching for a needle in a haystack
(seriously!) would be interesting?

For some reason, the developers
were under the impression that including text from the original
novel between levels would lend the game an
air of authenticity. In fact, I’ve even read other opinions
on this game elsewhere wherein the reviewer(s) remark on the liberties
the developers have taken with the novel by adding hopping and fighting
elements and then praise the game for sticking to the basics of the
book by including the aforementioned text. Good lord, have we finally
raised a nation of idiots or what? Even more abysmal is the thought
that students today are most likely substituting reading the actual
book in favor of playing the game, much like students of the past
would read Cliff Notes or watch a movie adaptation, only now everything
has been dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator: “Uh,
yeah, like my favorite part of the book was like when Bilbo hopped
across the pond and then took out a pack of wolves with his ninja
staff.”

So if you have children and want to discourage them from ever reading,
then just let them play this game. Instead, be a good parent and
plop them down with a paperback version of The Hobbit and allow Middle-Earth
to exist in their imagination rather than as a lesser version of
Super Mario World.

Final Grade: D

System Requirements:

PC

• PII 450
• 128 MB RAM
• 1.5 GB HD
• 32 MB 3D Card