YMMV / LEGO The Lord of the Rings

• Annoying Video Game Helper: In the Dead Marshes, Gollum's "This way, hobbits!" very quickly becomes annoying.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: The games are based more on the movies than the original books; though since these are the Cliffs Notes versions of the plots anyway, the difference is rarely noticeable.
• Crosses the Line Twice: What does the game do with Boromir's death, one of the saddest moments in the series? They make the arrow that kills him a banana, and he almost gets shot with a chicken before Aragorn intervenes. Then during the funeral scene, his boat gets caught on a rock before it can go over the Falls of Rauros, leading to Gimli hitting it with a pebble...whereupon it bounces off every rock in the falls like it's a plinko machine. Disrespectful? Depends on who you ask. Funny? Guiltily so.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In the prologue cutscene when we see the leaders of the three races with their rings, we of course see the nine kings of men who became the Nazgul. Instead of giving a blank stare like in the movie, the Witch-king gives a Kubrick Stare-Psychotic Smirk combo right to the player.
  • Attempting to enter an area that has been blocked off by Sauron's gaze will treat you to a Jump Scare of the Eye of Sauron staring at you with an accompanying scream-type Scare Chord. Even worse is that fast-traveling to the open Isengard will sometimes glitch into acting like the place is still blocked, making the jumpscare even more startling due to being impossible to expect.
• Nightmare Retardant: How about Shelob wearing skates and kneepads? Or trolls with huge purple mohawks?
• That One Sidequest:
  • A few of the levels in LEGO The Lord of the Rings, particularly "The Black Rider" and "Mount Doom", feature high-speed running sequences. There's usually a treasure minikit hidden in one spot during these, and you only have one chance to get it each time you attempt the level. The altered checkpoint system does alleviate this a bit by allowing you to quit the level without saving and start over at at the beginning of the chase, but it's still not easy.
  • Some of the sidequests to unlock characters. Saruman in particular is an unforgiving climb up Isengard requiring almost every special ability in the game. And takes 500,000 studs to unlock.
• Underused Game Mechanic: In The Pass of Caradhras level, the game introduces deep snow, which smaller characters need another bigger character's help with getting across. There is even a dedicated item to help small characters walk on it to bypass this. However, after the first part of this level, deep snow never appears again and the item only serves to help characters walk on tightropes without an elf character.

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