The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Reviews
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.
For all its many flaws, LOTR: Gollum is an oft-beautiful and oddly endearing adventure.
Broken beyond belief but also a fundamentally bad idea for a video game, with inanely shallow and repetitive gameplay - Gollum is not only the worst mainstream game of the year but of the last two generations.
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.
That’s the real problem with Gollum: It’s a game of contradictions. It wants to be a precision platformer, but the platforming is imprecise and unpredictable. It wants to be a stealth game, but the sneaky mechanics are uninspired and enemy AI is too dumb to make it challenging. It wants to be an action game, but Gollum doesn’t have the strength to engage in any real action. And on top of these contradictions is the crushing weight of bugs that break the game. There’s potential tucked deep within the bones of Daedalic Entertainment’s game, but The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is giving bad early-aughts 3D platformer in the worst way imaginable, putting it in the running for 2023's worst game.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a commendable game for Daedalic's effort to tell a totally original story in Middle-earth mixing stealth mechanics and platforming, but it makes water on almost all sides: imprecise controls, terrible AI, insipid narrative, outdated level design and graphics from another generation.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was conceptually a game with some promise, but from what I've seen so far, it's a mediocre and messy experience that doesn't really come together into a cohesive whole. That is, of course, before coming to the bugs, the crashes and the game-breaking progression issues that make it impossible to complete at this time. Considering that I was actually looking forward to this, this one really stings.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Lord of the Rings fans will appreciate a lot of what Gollum is offering. It’s genuinely cool seeing such a fascinating side character step into the protagonist role in a story that further expands on a universe teeming with secrets to discover. It’s a bummer that there isn’t much else to write home about. A dull gameplay experience and technical hiccups make The Lord of the Rings: Gollum just as much of a polarizing experience as its main character.
Plagued by several problems and with gameplay far from modern standards, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not the third-person adventure that we would have expected from Daedalic Entertainment. Except for the good characterization of the main character and for an overall appreciable plot, the new game of the German software house fails to be convincing and represents a wasted opportunity to offer the right amount of entertainment to all Tolkien fans who have a good passion for video games.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a stealth, action and platform adventure that has some interesting ideas, but lacks cooking. A video game of classic structure whose gaps are evident both in the narrative, as in the playable, technical and aesthetic.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is littered with technical and gameplay issues that dampen the fact that there's a great story at its heart.
Daedalic had an opportunity to prove the cynics wrong when so many people wondered what the hell the point of a Gollum game would even be. Instead, they handled this with such utter clumsiness they likely ensured a game like it will never happen again.
It's unfortunate, but The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum fails to expand the world of Middle-earth in any meaningful way. There are glimmers of something good(ish) in there, but it's suffocated by a disjointed story, awkward controls and dull stealth.
Just like Gollum, I'm a bit split. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum features a great story that adds to the lore, along with a terrific stealth system, but it misses the mark in other areas. A finicky and redundant platforming system, mixed with a dialogue system that lacks bite makes for a combination that drags the rest down. Gollum is always so close to The Ring, but ever so far.
A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien's fiction
Much like the namesake character himself, The Lord of The Rings: Gollum couldn't be saved from what it became. Frustrating platforming coupled with boring gameplay and cheap ways to die make any experience hard to play. Unfortunately, the intriguing setting and lore exploration can't come close to overshadowing the game's fundamental issues.