The Lord Of The Rings Gollum Review – Tarnished and Unfinished

Gollum has arrived in The Lord Of The Rings Gollum though when you think of ‘Lord Of The Rings’ games your mind is drawn to the classics; ‘The Two Towers’, ‘The Return of the King’, and ‘The Third Age’ on PS2. ‘The Battle for Middle Earth 1 and 2 on PC. ‘The War in the North’ and ‘LOTR: Conquest’ on Xbox 360. And finally, both ‘Shadow of Mordor’ and ‘Shadow of War’ on both PS4 and Xbox One. Each of these games injected new stories and endless fun into the franchise, letting you play as both classic and new characters that brought a sense of nostalgia and lore to each game.

There has also been a fair share of weaker games in the past for the franchise as well; ‘The Hobbit (PS2), ‘The Fellowship Of The Ring’ and ‘Aragorn’s Quest’ to name a few. However, none of these compares to the complete and utter blunder that is ‘The Lord of The Rings Gollum’.

For starters, no one asked for a game with Gollum as the main character. Out of the entire ‘Lord Of The Rings franchise, there are so many rich and interesting characters to base a game on. So why in the world would you pick the weakest character of them all?

The main issue around ‘Gollum’ (and believe me there are a few) is that we all know his story already. We know how weak he is, and that already rings alarm bells to how Gollum will handle things like combat in his own game (…)

The other thing is creating an entirely new appearance of the character is risky given how much Andy Serkis’s take on Gollum is engrained into pop culture. There’s a reason Gollum in the Shadow of Mordor games looked like the Gollum we all know and that is down to popularity and auteurism.

And that brings me to Gollum’s look in the game.

Quite frankly he looks horrific. The developers have done a good job of making a pathetic character look even more weak and helpless. He looks trapped in a perpetual Sméagol persona that even when he does switch to Gollum there is no form of visual switch in his facial mannerisms to make that part of his personality more controlling and corrupted.

This leads me to the graphics for The Lord Of The Rings Gollum.

And it really does break my heart to be saying this again as a gamer in 2023 playing on the 9th generation consoles, that the graphics are not even worthy of the console I’m playing it on. To explain, I’m playing Gollum on an Xbox Series X and it honestly looks and feels like a PS2 Game. This should not be the case in 2023. Time and time again games are rushed out the door to meet their impossible release dates, to then rely so heavily on post-launch updates to fix everything.

This shouldn’t be happening. That’s what made the PS2 and Xbox 360/PS3 era of consoles the golden age of gaming. Games were released finished and polished. Fast forward to 2023 and Gollum looks like plasticine, the Orcs look wooden and the human characters look like playmobile models with fuzzy hair. At least the environments look remotely interesting. And I’ll give the developers that. They’ve done a good job at making Mordor look like hell on Earth.

Now for the story, which unfortunately is a forgettable one. It starts off with Gollum imprisoned after escaping from prison in Mordor (Gollum can’t catch a break). He is then interrogated by a wizard asking how he managed to escape Mordor and if he told the enemy about Bilbo Baggins. So, it’s obvious who this Wizard is and also places the timeline of the game in between ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’. However, correct me if I’m wrong here, but I wasn’t aware that after Gollum breaks out of captivity and torture in Mordor, he is then captured again by the Elves.

It doesn’t make sense and as I said it is very forgettable due to its unbelievably slow pacing. And the explanation behind how Gollum was captured and sent to the slave camps of Mordor was that he was trying to catch a beetle and accidentally fell down a cliff and into Mordor. It just feels lazily written.

The gameplay isn’t much to scream about either. It’s essentially a walking simulator mixed with a bunch of fetch quests and really bad stealth sections.

And when I say fetch quests, I mean it! Some of the objectives this game gives are so blunt and simple. Like, go collect the tags, go wait in line, and (my favorite) go back to your cell and look out of your window to end the day.

For a weak character like Gollum, he can run surprisingly fast and jump ridiculously high. However, both of these mechanics fall flat when you are expected to run and jump from one ledge to another to then miss it completely and fall to your death even though in reality you should have been able to make the jump.

This happens time and time again trying to accomplish the simplest of tasks due to poor controls. And what makes it even worse is that there are times when you aren’t even sure what you are supposed to be jumping to which leads to multiple deaths just trying to progress forwards.

Also, there are times when Gollum had the stamina to run but lacked the ability to jump. This happened only in certain areas of the game, but I’d imagine if Gollum had the energy to sprint like Usain Bolt in a 100m dash then surely he can jump right? But again when Gollum makes his mad dash to the finish line his stamina bar depletes almost immediately and takes way too long to recharge.

You can also climb in this game however it feels ripped straight out of ‘Uncharted’ and ‘Jedi: Fallen Order’ with the claimable areas being so obvious with a white marking to them.

The stealth sections also feel like a poor throwback to the old ‘Assassin’s Creed’ follow missions, making you hide in tall grass and listen to enemies. You can stealth kill Orcs by sneaking up behind them, but it’s very hit-and-miss. What makes this ‘Stealth’ technique of taking out an Orc so strange is if they are wearing a helmet (or anything on their head for that matter) you will not be able to ‘throttle’ and kill them. This also goes for Elves and anything that isn’t an Orc without a helmet on. Even if you try you’ll be caught almost instantly leading to a game over the screen.

There’s also a section where you have to escape Shelob’s lair where the game suddenly turns into Crash Bandicoot. What makes this section so frustrating and disjointing is that you are running towards the camera and can’t see what obstacles are ahead of you even though in reality Gollum would be very capable of seeing what is in front of him. This led to so many unnecessary deaths and way too much frustration.

One promising gameplay feature was the choice system where you could approach a problem and argue between the two personalities of Gollum and Sméagol. Take the first appearance of this feature for example. Gollum has been chasing a beetle and finally catches up to it. The feature then engages forcing an argument between Gollum and Sméagol.

Gollum wants to kill the beetle as he believes it’s a spy working for Sauron. Sméagol on the other hand believes it wants to be friends with him which is the reason why it has been following them. I chose to side with Sméagol’s argument for the beetle which then convinces Gollum to leave it alone. This feature had so much potential to make the game diverse in its storytelling by using the choice to shape the player’s path through the game.

Yet what we get instead is a linear game with no diverging paths and these argument sections between the two titular characters ultimately lead to nothing. It’s such a shame to include the bare bones of this feature without fleshing it out to its full potential.

The game runs at a surprisingly steady frame rate in performance mode on the Xbox Series X. However when I tried playing it in either quality mode or quality mode with Ray tracing, the frame rate would become inconsistent and buggy.

Now I did try the game on an Xbox One to see how it held up on the last gen console.

And the answer? Not very well.

It’s super buggy, the frame rate is all over the place, Gollum somehow looks worse and the graphics look super blurry and like a very early PS2 game.

The game comes in a standard edition and a deluxe (precious) edition of The Lord Of The Rings Gollum. The content you get in the deluxe edition however is rather confusing. You get the game’s soundtrack, a lore compendium, a different variant of voice over and video game artwork. All the things that game these days have in them already for free. And what’s even more confusing than the fact you have to pay for these, is that the artwork ‘additional content’ shows up in your console’s apps rather than the game itself.

I’d love to know the reasoning behind this ‘The Lord Of The Rings Gollum deluxe content’ because it’s not making any sense to me.

One good thing that the game has going for it is the sound design. The sound effects of Mordor feel authentic, you can hear the pitter-patter of Gollum’s bare feet as he’s crawling across the ground or climbing up a ladder and even the voice of Gollum is not half bad. I’m not the biggest fan of it personally as I love Andy Serkis’s voice, however, the voice artist has done a good job making Sméagol sound weak and pathetic and Gollum sound controlling and vile. All other voices in this game just don’t match up and at times feel very amateur.

Now the developers have released an apology statement on social media for the state of The Lord Of The Rings Gollum (to add to the ongoing apology statements post-launch this year) and there has been an update which has added some slight improvements to the game. However, it’s just not good enough, unfortunately. The state in which this game was released is not up to the standard we should be getting in this day and age. I did think it very odd that there was hardly any marketing for this game. It just kind of released to very little fan fair. I now understand why.

Now I know this has been a very critical review, however, it needed to be in order to stress my point that games need to stop being rushed out of the door before they are even finished. As I said before, we’ve seen too many apology statements recently from games like ‘Cyberpunk 2077’, ‘Battlefield 2042’, ‘Forspoken’ and ‘Redfall’ that were rushed out to meet a deadline and have been released in a broken state. It needs to stop because gamers are very aware of this trend and are sick of it!

Anyway back to the point.

‘The Lord Of The Rings Gollum’ is a game that could have been rather enjoyable if it hadn’t been rushed out in the state that it’s in. However given that it’s a game about the least interesting character in the franchise and the long list of problems it has with it, I unfortunately have to give it a 1 out of 10.