Unfortunately, there are some cutscenes in areas where there weren't in the previous game. There are far less cutscenes and most of them don't force both players to watch if they only affect one player, although cutscenes did sometimes still cover the entire screen inexplicably. Thankfully this game does respect your time a little bit more than the LEGO The Lord of the Rings game. Unlocking the blacksmith itself (which is needed before you can forge any items) is also locked behind a quest, so you have to find this quest before you can even begin to forge items or get red brick upgrades. To make matters worse, this game has 'questlines', where some quests (including red brick quests) don't appear until the previous quest is finished.

Although the types of quests seemed to be slightly more varied this time around, there are still tons of fetch quests, and the new quests include equally tedious escort and resource gathering quests, and red bricks are still locked behind certain quests. All cutscene dialogue is taken from the movies (although it doesn't feel as rushed and forced in this game as it did in LEGO The Lord of the Rings), the map has a similar layout (although there's enough changes and additions that it didn't feel like an exact copy of the map from LEGO The Lord of the Rings to me), there's similar minikits and items to collect in each level, the 'gold bricks' are still called 'mythril' and are still used to forge items, which are needed to unlock red bricks, and unfortunately, side quests can once again be found all over the map. This gameplay itself has quite a bit in common with the LEGO The Lord of the Rings game and is once again fairly standard for a LEGO game. The UI has also been improved over the cluttered, janky UI from the LEGO The Lord of the Rings game, although it still has issues with being a bit too crowded when playing with two players.

The visuals have come a long way from the early LEGO games and despite the blocky nature of much of the game, they graphics look fantastic. The greatest strength of this game is that it looks very good. After playing through some rather disappointing LEGO games recently, including the tedious, buggy disaster that is LEGO The Lord of the Rings, I was hoping this newer game set in the same universe would turn this around and improve on the weaknesses of its predecessors, but unfortunately, that didn't turn out to be the case.

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