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A love of Lego as a child has stuck with me ever since. I used to play with it a lot. My younger self would hungrily build sets received at birthdays and Christmas, then quickly repurpose their parts for far grander designs: studded brick landscapes that stretched from living room wall to kitchen door.TT Games' Lego franchise has never had the same scope for creativity as the original toy - and for that there's now Minecraft - but the series is starting to match the imagination of Lego fans via the complex worlds it now offers up for exploration. And amongst 2014's games, Lego: The Hobbit's version of Middle Earth was a guilty pleasure of a world that I kept going back to.
Let's be clear - if you are tired of the Lego franchise's formulaic approach to individual level design then it is unlikely that Hobbit (or any other recent entry in the series) is about to win you back. The criticisms levelled at it in Eurogamer's revieware fair and, perhaps, overdue. There's much that TT Games could work on and improve. But the series is changing - to the point where the game's scripted story missions are now just a small part of the full experience on offer.
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