More graphics, less talk, less depth
While The Hobbit was a ZX Spectrum marvel, managing to create a small world (which even had some random events that occurred without your involvement, in the background!) that really transported you in Tolkien's realm, this sequel took the easy way of skimping on the actual meat of the game, the dialogues, the descriptions, the lore, and just gave you more static pictures. But you see, for a text adventure that's not the way to go. Frankly it could just have been better, as the game follows the compelling story of The Lord of the Rings (the first portion of it, the events leading to the formation of the fellowship and some other bits) but the quality control and the sparse descriptions (and also the poorer implementation of the parser phrasing) just let you down, bit by bit. Maybe The Hobbit was an accident, who knows, maybe it's not so easy to build a compelling text adventure, but at any rate, I was pretty bummed playing it, to the extent I even managed it, as this is the kind of deal that really needs you making use of a walkthrough (Otherwise you'd be stuck for hours trying to figure out how to tell the game what to do!). Sorry, I can't really recommend it, not even to hardcore fans of The Hobbit; it will just let you down on so many levels. Instead, try this Interplay version, an RPG that is well adjusted and more than playable even today.
