The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Reviews
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is the worst game I’ve ever played, it barely functions and when it does it’s just mundanely boring.
This is a problem across the entire games industry and far too much of the work it produces. What makes Gollum stand out is that most other developers and publishers then use their creative teams to try and hide the crass cynicism and capitalism. Daedalic didn’t bother with Gollum. This game represents the games industry with its mask off.
I wanted The Lord of the Rings: Gollum to be a slam dunk given how fantastic the source material is. Unfortunately though, the game suffers from a wide range of issues from the janky platforming and stealth mechanics to the underwhelming visuals. Thankfully, Gollum himself is nicely animated and voice-acted, but it's not enough to overcome the game's faults.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is undoubtedly one of the worst games this industry has ever seen. From gameplay to visuals, it's a complete mess. There is no reason on god's green earth to experience this game. So don't bother!
Review in Persian | Read full review
If the team behind The Lord of the Rings: Gollum manages to get it in an acceptable state, the foundation of this game is still hopelessly rotten at its core. No amount of polish can undo the miscalculated story and game design. Daedalic would effectively have to restart the entire development process and start over to salvage it.
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.
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.
It should be removed from physical & digital shelves until it can be finished without resorting to banging your skull against sheetrock.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum had nearly endless potential to be great but it instead became the prime example of why beta testing a game before release is important. With issues like stuttering or momentary lag spikes all pointing to a severe lack of optimization, this game was doomed to be a flop from the start. The only hope for this game now is not just a quick patch but a massive overhaul to fix its biggest issues.
Gollum isn’t protagonist material, at least not for a video game. He is a wretched creature who only survived the events of The Hobbit because Bilbo took pity on him. If The Lord of the Rings: Gollum can be said to have one achievement, it perfectly emulates the painful experience of being Gollum, as it makes you feel just as sad and wretched as Sméagol himself. This story didn’t need to be told, as the exciting parts of Gollum’s life were displayed in Tolkien’s works, and this game only sullies the characters created by the great author with its terrible… everything.
It turned out that, for Daedalic Entertainment, The Lord of the Rings Gollum was a hot potato, which blew it.
Review in Greek | Read full review
Utterly shambolic in almost every way, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is an abject failure as a stealth and traversal game, continuously tripping over itself with technical incompetence to such an extent it’s virtually impossible to recommend. Featuring monotonous climbing and sneaking mechanics, cheap deaths from heights akin to a paddling pool, a boring structure, plain and uninteresting characters, a host of technical blemishes, mostly-poor visuals, a woodpecker-quality soundtrack, and an overall dismal and trying experience, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is absolutely atrocious. Much like its protagonist, it’s a cursed product that should be cast into the smoldering fires of Mount Doom.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is unfortunately a product that is not only poorly developed, but also poorly optimized, a terrible combination for any video game. Playing it is like being trapped in a title from the early 2000s, a fertile time for a series of licensed games whose production ambition is proportional to their questionable technical capacity.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a buggy mess, even disregarding the constant crashes. Not only that, but it is a game void of any personality, originality, or bravery. It attempts nothing new and falls back on tropes that started falling out of style years ago, while somehow still managing to replicate them poorly. It disappoints me not just as a fan of the Lord of the Rings, but also as a fan of video games in general.
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.
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 is nothing more than a failed project that should have been cancelled, but since it is a lucrative IP, it was released to the market to deceive the unwary and that, gentlemen, is a scam that should not be be tolerated in this industry.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Gollum might be the worst release of 2023 so far. Why Daedalic agreed to do this and didn't cancel it is a mystery.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Perhaps it’s thematically fitting that the game itself is such an oddball outlier that’s been met with cruelty and misunderstanding since its announcement. There’s poetry to that, but it didn’t make my 11-hour playthrough any more enjoyable.