The Lord of the Rings hasn’t always been lucky with games, but today the darkness is gathering over the franchise more than ever. “Survival” about the gnomes in Moria, mobile games from Electronic Arts and … “The Lord of the Rings: Gollum”. To do so badly, you need to try.
The publisher, before giving money to Daedalic Entertainment, had to ask the only question: “Who is interested in Gollum anyway?!”. The character has been revealed in Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s films – there is no interesting backstory for the former hobbit, and there cannot be due to his manic obsession with the Ring.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum has a banal and boring plot, stretched over 10 chapters, half of which are useless ordeals in Gollum in Barad-dur, a prison-fortress in the mountains of Mordor. There, the creature was pressed for information about the One Ring, but this happens in the first chapter! Five hours show us the hard life of a Mordorian prisoner, who is obliged to run through underground passages and mines, blow up barrels of gunpowder and collect badges of dead prisoners!
But even when Gollum gets out of Barad-dûr, things don’t get any better. It seems that the developers deliberately stretched the game to justify the $60 price tag on consoles! Escape from Shelob looks like it’s taken from a PlayStation 2 adventure game, squalid platforming through square tree branches in Thranduil’s realm, Gollum’s horrendous landing and ledge-grabbing registration, this game is straight out of the 2000s and looked into the year 2023.
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The game designer who accepted the job, as well as the entire QA department – listed in the credits – should be fired for incompetence. Sometimes it’s not clear what to do on a level at a particular moment, and you feel like a cretin who suffers of his own free will. The solution comes by pure chance – when for the hundredth time you go through the options for solutions, inspect the area – and you slap your forehead in despair and relief!
Platforming takes up 90% of the time in the game and is so poorly done that you want to fight in epilepsy! Gollum doesn’t cling where he should have. Doesn’t jump where it needs to, although you can direct the character precisely with the gamepad stick. The ledges are specially clearly highlighted by the developers, but this does not help and only irritates more. Those mediocrity didn’t even try to work on the level design!
When The Lord of the Rings: Gollum tries to capture you, showing the intrigues within the Mordorian intelligentsia, it becomes at least a little more interesting. Let the cut-scenes be crooked, let the animation of the characters kill with crookedness. The atmosphere of the Lord of the Rings is of interest, and not the work of the screenwriters! Just because I know all the ins and outs of Mordor, I know who the Mouth of Sauron is, why the henchmen of the dark lord are looking for the One Ring – “Gollum” managed to interest me during the passage and did not make the passage completely terrible. If you are not familiar with the universe, then don’t even waste your time.
Brightening up the passage and the fact that the plot is non-linear. The development of events, the life of the characters and the behavior of Gollum depend on the player’s choices. I tried to overcome the inner demon of the hobbit Smeagol, choosing (not always) the side of the former hobbit. At these moments, you need to convince the second “I” of the character in a mini-game of choosing dialogues. It’s not difficult to do this, but it’s real to make a mistake – a couple of times Gollum took over Smeagol and everything didn’t go the way he wanted. But will I be replaying the game to change my choices? No, by no means – playing Gollum is commensurate with a corral of needles under your nails.
But these two pluses, albeit stretched like eagles on the towers of Barad-Dur, do not allow you to enjoy the game. Blame the technical condition of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. More precisely, the lack of attempts to make it adequate!
There are so many bugs in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum that I even lost count. The game can assign a checkpoint at the moment of death of the character and you have to replay the entire level – and they are rather big here! Can count the quest item as used, but roll back the player to the point before it was used – no item, no progress! Force several times to enter the same combination of solving the puzzle, because previous attempts were not counted by the script. It’s like playing a pirated disc that you bought at a junket!
But no, we were given a copy for the PlayStation 5 for review. Although Gollum looks like the editors gave out the version for the PlayStation 2! Soapy textures, dropping frame rates at random, flat foliage on the trees, and stretched images of the palace in the distance. Out of fear that my PS5 still did not survive the meeting with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and the video chip of the console was dying, I even launched other games. And I calmed down – the rest of the projects were in order. This “Gollum” looked like a miserable student craft for term paper!
Diagnosis
Never buy The Lord of the Rings: Gollum! Even at discounts, even out of interest to find out how bad everything is. Don’t give money to Nacon and Daedalic Entertainment, because this by-product of the gaming industry is not worth a penny from the players’ wallets. This game should not have been born, and even the “funny translation” of Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov would not have saved it. The project should have been abandoned in the mines of Moria or left in the darkness of Barad-Dur at the concept stage, so that its terrible face would never denigrate the Lord of the Rings franchise and the name of Professor Tolkien.