The Hobbit is Sierra’s 2003 game based on J R R Tolkein’s famous book of the same name. You take the part of Bilbo Baggins, an unadventurous and respectable hobbit (the two go hand in hand who is suddenly plunged into a great adventure when the wizard Gandalf turns up at his door one day – along with 13 dwarves! The dragon Smaug has stolen all their treasure, and the dwarves want to get it back. To do so would be virtually impossible by military force alone, so they enlist the help of a burglar – that’s you, Mr Baggins.
The Hobbit is an action adventure with a touch of RPG thrown in. The game flows the storyline of the book quite closely, and at each stage in the game you will have certain quests to complete, some obligatory and a few optional, to complete before you can move onto the next part of the game. You begin in the town of Hobbiton, gathering supplies for the grand journey ahead. Later on you need to fight spiders (lots of spiders in this game), rescue dwarves from evil orcs, evade loutish trolls, and circumnavigate huge mining complexes. You start off with just a staff for a weapon, though you can also use it as a pole vault which is dead useful, later acquiring Sting, the Elvish blade that becomes even more famous in Lord of the Rings (when Bilbo’s nephew, Frodo, is given it.) Of course somewhere along the way you will meet the creature Gollum and find the ring, being able to use it’s ability to make you invisible to your advantage. If melee combat isn’t for you, you can also lob stones at your enemies. (This is also an essential skill for some of the puzzles.) As with most similar games, the puzzles basically consist of how you get from point A to point B, but they are skilfully woven into the fabric of the gameplay so it doesn’t feel banal as in some games. The interface isn’t perfect, with the keyboard / mouse combination occasionally awkward, but mostly it works okay. Graphically the game is good with a very nice portrayal of Middle Earth, plenty of detail and nice touches. There are however quite a few graphical bugs, mostly in the form of your character suddenly becoming transparent or semi-opaque (without using the ring!), and objects partially disappearing into the background or another object. This didn’t affect the gameplay itself but did detract somewhat from the overall game experience. The viewpoint is usually just behind the player but occasionally veers off in weird angles and sometimes becomes first person for a short time. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to this and in some parts of the game did become quite frustrating. The ambient sound effects and music were superb, very atmospheric. There are several suspenseful moments in the game and the sound really added to this. The voice acting was good (perhaps some will be disappointing that the voices aren’t those of the actors in the LOTR films) and very clear.
I had been looking forward to playing The Hobbit for a long time, having had my eye on it ever since it came out on the Sold Out Software label, but only bought it recently. At £3.33 (3 games for £10) it really is superb value for money, it will take you many hours to complete the game and even more to discover all its secrets. I found the gameplay to be very enjoyable and the difficulty level gauged almost perfectly. There were some parts that had me pulling my hair out but not for too long, and the game cleverly has clues built in, not that you’ll necessarily recognise the clues straight away. The game uses BINK video for the cut scenes which are high quality and at times make you think you’re involved in an animated movie more than playing a computer game.
The system specs aren’t too high, with the following minimum system needed:
OS – Win 98 / Me / XP
CPU – 450MHz
HDD space – 1.7Gb (the game comes on 2 CD-ROMs)
CD-ROM – 4x speed
DirectX – 8.1
RAM: 128Mb
Sound card: DirectX 8.1 compatible
The RPG element comes in, apart from the quests, in the form of “courage points” that you can collect in various ways – some are lying around, some will be released when you defeat opponents, some will be given for completing quests. When you reach enough of these courage points, you level up – adding one health point to your total maximum health points. Personally I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a little more of an RPG element to the game, but it’s not a big problem. You also collect money throughout the game ,and at the end of each stage you get the chance to spend it by stocking up on items or better equipment.
I really like the way that the storyline has been woven into the game. I’m not huge fan of the book because of the writing style, but the plot itself is still great. This game doesn’t quite do it justice, perhaps, but it’s a lot of fun and certainly didn’t disappoint me in any significant way. With the cheap price it’s definitely 4 stars.
Age rating: 7
Other Info and hints:
Press Enter to skip the somewhat lengthy opening credits
Look out for your health bar showing green – it means you’re poisoned.
Buy a bigger medicine chest as soon as you can – in the early levels you will hardly use any health potions at all, but when you enter Mirkwood you are going to need LOTS of health potions and antidotes!
VERY IMPORTANT: visit http://gamesnews.yahoo.com/predownload?eid=327312 and get the update to version 1.3 patch, otherwise the game will probably crash quiet a lot (and it becomes impossible to complete the dwarf mines due to a repeating bug). Annoyingly this patch is not available on the official game site.
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