The Lord of The Rings – Gollum sucks. I really hate to speak so directly negatively about anything that people worked hard on, but my God, the experience of playing Gollum just really, truly sucks.
Gollum is a third-person stealth platformer with rubbish stealth design and even worse platforming where most of the game’s levels are centred around utterly banal fetch quests. The concept behind it is solid enough; telling the story of Gollum’s years imprisoned in Mordor between The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.
As a huge fan of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, another ‘prison-break prequel’, I can absolutely see how the concept could have been executed here in as tense, thrilling and memorable a way as that game was. Gollum manages to be none of these things though. Where Butcher Bay made some kind of sense as a location with levels that felt as if they logically connected to one another, Gollum’s dungeon complex is an utterly nonsensical labyrinth of forgettable spaces that feel on the level of a 90s Tomb Raider wannabe.
The Lord of the Rings – Gollum
Every level is a true pain to navigate, made significantly worse by the frustratingly imprecise way Gollum controls. The path is frequently obscure, and subtly highlighted ledges are often all but indistinguishable from the surrounding environment due to how blurry and washed-out the textures are. A drop from the slightest height will take a significant chunk from Gollum’s health, if not kill him outright.
On multiple occasions, the game set a reload checkpoint for me a nanosecond before he pancaked on the ground, forcing me to restart the entire level over again. Just infuriating. Even more baffling is that there were several instances where I’d miss a jump, plunge to my death, and the reload checkpoint brought me back further ahead in the level than I’d actually progressed to.
Stealth is as bare-bones as it comes. You can hold a button down to sneak, and sequences that demand doing so will invariably feature tall grass and deep shadows to conceal yourself in. Gollum can throw gathered stones at metal objects as distractions and can break lamps with them. You can stealth kill enemies that aren’t wearing helmets, and it is made explicitly clear that Gollum can only do this to helmetless foes, but a cutscene midway through the game shows him easily sneaking up and throttling to death a helmeted Orc identical to the ones you encounter during actual gameplay.
Much is made in the first third of the game about a bird companion and your ability to command it, but this goes precisely nowhere and never actually amounts to real gameplay. There’s a whole split-personality thing going on too. Occasionally you’re forced into arguments between the sinister Gollum and his suppressed, good-natured Smeagol persona in scenes pulled stylistically straight from Peter Jackson’s films. This is supposed to be where major decisions concerning secondary characters occur, but considering how almost none of these characters is in any way likable or even terribly memorable, it doesn’t really amount to anything.
The game is an absolute technical mess also. On the PS5 version, I experienced flashing black boxes during cutscenes and several instances where I’d leap from one platform to another only to get stuck on an invisible object. I also health with sporadic stuttering and models that would take entirely too long to properly load their full-fidelity textures, and those are just the moment-to-moment basics.
There are puzzles that are so completely broken that I seriously considered putting the game down entirely and declaring it unfinishable. A sequence relatively early on that has you hatching the aforementioned meaningless bird companion, places you in a small room where you have to collect an egg, dye it either brown, black, or white, place it on a pedestal, and then build a fire to the appropriate level for whatever colour you chose. There’s a visual key another prisoner has scrawled on the wall for how to do this, but the texture was so blurred that it was incomprehensible, and every time I’d collect an egg from the dye pool, Gollum’s audio was completely mismatched to whatever colour I’d shaded it.
The full half an hour of my life spent on this god-forsaken puzzle was one of the most brain-breakingly painful experiences I’ve ever had in a video game, and I still have no actual clue how I solved it in the end. A puzzle right at the end of the game also had Gollum’s audio completely mismatched to what was on screen, and I have no clue how I ended up solving that one after ages spent on it either.
Maybe the most impressive issue I encountered though was during a level where the objective is to reach a specific destination. After a while spent climbing my way up to a plateau, the stage presented me with a pathway leading to a massive open void where no actual level geometry exists. I could walk Gollum out onto a flat plane for a short distance where the path continued and see right behind the environment rendering and into endless nothingness.
After spending a good twenty minutes trying to find out where I’m supposed to go, I ended up just jumping off into the ether. Gollum fell for almost a full minute before dying, and the checkpoint for respawning turned out to be right on that flat plane at the mouth of the void with the geometry still not having loaded. After doing a full power cycle of my PS5 and a restart of the level, I clawed my way back up to that plateau where low and behold, the missing area was now there. Hilariously it was the actual objective location of the entire level too.
The Lord of The Rings – Gollum is every bit as twisted, nasty, broken and miserable as its protagonist. It is without doubt the most objectively poor and outright broken game that I have ever pushed through to completion. A patch has been promised for launch that may well alleviate some of the technical woes that plague the game, but no amount of fixes can pave over its utterly mediocre overall design. Spend your money on a second breakfast instead.
The Lord of The Rings – Gollum was reviewed on PS5 using digital code provided by Daedalic Entertainment.
