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One of the worst Lord of the Rings games ever made - The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Quick Review

894 View2023-05-27

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Skip it. The only situation in which I can see The Lord of the Rings: Gollum being worth playing is if you’re getting a bunch of friends together to laugh at a game that is so misguided and poorly designed that it’s genuinely pretty funny. The idea of making a game based on The Lord of the Rings franchise’s most pathetic, tragic character is questionable to begin with, but if there’s a way to pull it off, the developers at Daedalic Entertainment have not found it. As is, Gollum is a bizarre blend of overly simple stealth, terrible platforming, and graphics and level design that feel like they’re from the PlayStation 2 era. It’s so bad that the developer has issued an apology for the game.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played five hours of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum on the Xbox Series S. In that time, I’ve completed two of the game’s ten chapters and made a bit of progress into the third. The second chapter took up most of that time, as the first is a brief tutorial sequence.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• It made me laugh, I guess? This feels brutal to say, and I take no joy in being mean, but there’s really not a lot that I liked in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. The one positive I can note is that some of the design choices, level transitions, and gameplay glitches are so crazy that they made me burst into laughter. At one point, I was laughing so hard that it actually made my stomach hurt and I had to pause the game. At least it’s not boring!

WHAT SUCKS

• Bizarre misuse of the license. The Lord of the Rings is the grandfather of high fantasy, and while I’m not the biggest fan of the series, I definitely respect it for what it is: a super-self-serious epic adventure with absurdly deep lore. In theory, Gollum could slot into that lore just fine; it seeks to fill in the gaps on what the One Ring-warped creature known as Gollum was up to between the events of The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. In practice, though, the backstory presented here feels silly, over-the-top, and not really fitting with the character nor the world as presented in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. The reaction I’ve seen to this game from hardcore The Lord of the Rings fans suggests that they feel similarly, which means the audience most heavily targeted by this game are probably not going to like it.

• Overly simple, linear levels. The early parts of Gollum take place in Barad-Dur, a massive fortress that also houses prisoners of big bad guy Sauron. Maybe the game opens up more in later levels, which reportedly take Gollum to Mirkwood and other less cramped areas of Middle-earth, but for the first few chapters at least, I was forced down a very direct path with no real freedom to explore. I would likely question this choice in any game, but it particularly feels like a waste of such a massive, well-developed world that theoretically should be full of things to see and do. It’s also directly at odds with the stealth sequences that make up a big part of the gameplay.

• Dumbed down stealth and enemy AI. I often struggle with stealth games, so when I say that the stealth sequences in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum were easy, I mean, like, really easy. The only time I had any trouble was when it was unclear what direction the game expected me to go, such as when I missed the fact that a nearby wall was climbable because it wasn't really signposted. Those moments really just highlighted the issue here: There’s only ever one way forward, one expected solution to get through these stealth sections. Great stealth games are praised for the exact opposite, for having multiple ways to get through any given challenge. Don’t expect that exhilarating array of options here.

• Awful platforming. While I expected the stealth, I didn’t realize just how much platforming would be a focus in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Thankfully, I love platforming! Sounds great, right? Well, not so fast; the jumping, climbing, and swinging in this game all feel pretty bad, with the only saving grace being an extremely forgiving auto-grab that sees Gollum magnetizing to ledges or climbing walls, sometimes being pulled over to them from extreme distances in a way that looks incredibly goofy.

More than anything, the platforming here reminded me of 2003’s The Hobbit, another The Lord of the Rings video game adaptation which came out for Nintendo GameCube, PC, PlayStation 2, and Xbox and featured similarly janky platforming. The one big difference? That was 2003. There were sequences in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum where I could tell the developers were inspired by the adrenaline-pumping ledge-grabbing and parkour of games like the Uncharted series, but they clearly weren’t able to deliver anything close to that level.

• Bland graphics. The vast torture chambers, claustrophobic mines, and sweltering lava rivers of Barad-Dur present plenty of opportunities for stunning scenery, and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum wastes them all. The environments here all share muddied textures that would feel a little underwhelming on the Xbox 360, much less the Xbox Series S or X. Characters use stilted animations, and the only character model that seems to have received extra care and attention is that of Gollum himself. Too bad, then, that he ended up looking like a rejected DreamWorks Animation design. Nothing precioussss about that.

• Hilariously cynical DLC. If you've been following The Lord of the Rings: Gollum online prior to release, you probably saw the game getting roasted for its "Emotes Pack," a preorder bonus that's also offered as standalone DLC for $2.99 and promises "six of Gollum's iconic gestures and sayings." Emote DLC for a single-player game is absurd enough to begin with, but it gets worse. Daedalic Entertainment is also selling "Sindarin VO," a pack that adds new voiceovers for the game's elves so that they speak actual Elvish, a language created by Tolkien for his books. That one's $2.99 too. There's also the "Lore Compendium" DLC for $4.99; that adds an interactive lore menu with information about the characters, locations, and events of the game. You know, the kind of thing that's usually a standard element of any game with deep lore? Shameless.

💬 Will you be joining Sméagol to search for the nasty Hobbitses who stole his One Ring, or would you rather just do another rewatch of the Peter Jackson movies? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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