Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Severe Technical Instability
Archaic Level Design
Unappealing Visuals
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a fundamentally flawed and deeply disappointing venture into Middle-earth that suffers from dated visuals, frustratingly archaic stealth mechanics, and a myriad of technical issues that overshadow its occasionally interesting narrative premise.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum | A Split Personality - Cinematic Trailer
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum | A Unique Promise
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum - Sneak Peek Trailer
For all its many flaws, LOTR: Gollum is an oft-beautiful and oddly endearing adventure.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is filled with dull stealth, bad platforming, and a pointless story, and does little to justify why anyone should take the time to play it.
A strong sense of character is let down by poor controls, fiddly implementation, and bugs.
Much like its title character, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is compromised, inelegant, and a bit of an eyesore. To everyone except the most fervent of Tolkienites; you shall pass.
I constantly struggled against the controls, camera, and objectives as they were presented. And nothing about the story or characters of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum offers reason to push past the frustration. As a longtime fan of Tolkien’s fiction, it’s possible that I liked the game even less for the way it seemed to misuse the source material. It’s hard to have a more damning indictment than to say that this Gollum game isn’t for fans of The Lord of the Rings, but here we are.
Daedalic's long-delayed Tolkienian adventure is just as unlikeable and tragic as its namesake protagonist.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum could have ushered in a new era of The Lord of the Rings-based games. One that had the daring to fill in Tolkien’s gaps, but still showed respect for the source material. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum isn’t that game. While the story is compelling with a great performance from Smeagol/Gollum, the remainder of the game is a woeful mess. While Daedalic’s vision for Middle-earth is filled with artistic beauty, it’s altogether let down by a terrible technical presentation that’s far behind today’s standards. Ultimately, though, it’s the lack of polish and jankiness that is its undoing. From the myriad gameplay issues that bog down the simple mechanics to the mind-numbing crashes capable of hampering progression, there is little about The Lord of the Rings: Gollum that’s polished or enjoyable. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum crafts a compelling story around Gollum and Smeagol, but it fails to craft a polished, stable or enjoyable gameplay experience. Unfortunately, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum isn’t the Precious we’ve been searching for.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is an unwelcome throwback to the era of truly awful licensed games. It looks and plays like a movie tie-in game rushed out to meet a tight deadline. This is baffling as it was one of the first ‘next-gen’ games announced in 2019, and seemingly had a long production period. But even so, it’s a game that conceptually, visually, and technically screams out for additional development time. Patches and updates may squash the bugs. But with core gameplay so dull and lacking, I can't see a saving grace for Gollum.
