The Lord of the Rings - Gollum

For all its many flaws, LOTR: Gollum is an oft-beautiful and oddly endearing adventure.

It's heartbreaking because the project is courageous and good approaches are recognizable. However, the technical problems are hard to ignore, as is the stale gameplay. Still, we think the game is worth a look for fans of the franchise, if only because of the story.

The gameplay of Gollum, without great energy and suffering from a quickly palpable repetitiveness is balanced with the exploration of Tolkien"s lore, as well as with the duality of our character, central in the progression.

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.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum has the features of a solid "middle of the road” game. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here. The game is tiring, and I really wish this Gollum had a chance to return – with all his dialog lines, sarcasm, and the Smeagol persona – in a different, much better game.

We were very sorry not to give at least the sufficiency to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. But the limits are too many. The unpublished portion of the story is not up to Tolkien's saga and the playful phases are imprecise and obsolete. A thicker graphic rendering would have at least allowed fans to better enjoy some flashes of the pleasant artistic direction. In short, we hope that future patches will solve, if nothing else, the technical stumbling blocks. In any case, even if the stability of the game will improve in the future, Daedalic Entertainment's one is unfortunately not the treasure we wanted it to be.

Like the character itself, Gollum is an ugly, depressing, pitiable mess that's destined for a bad end and with little to recommend it. With a stronger design behind it, this title could've perhaps been redeemed, but the version we got isn't that. It's not good, it's not entertainingly bad, and it's not even interestingly broken. It's just a lackluster, licensed game that doesn't seem to have a point, and it focuses on a character that even die-hard fans don't want to play as.

The Lord of the Rings Gollum is a game that came out of time. the title almost never convinces in any of its aspects, resulting in many parts frustrating. the game optimization itself never manages to be stable making it difficult to play.

Quotation forthcoming.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a love letter to a flawed character that shares some flaws of its own. The care and love of Tolkien lore are quite obvious, but it doesn’t always mesh well with the disappointing mechanics and less-than-stellar gameplay.

The game is not very good and unfortunately quite boring. We would have liked something more epic on a saga like the Lord of the Rings. It's a pity, especially since the game is full of bugs as it is.

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.

Just like the character at its center, the game is in sad, broken shambles, held together only by the faint belief that the good things about it are enough to make its existence worthwhile.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is shocking at times. The gameplay is flat and repetitive, the stealth poorly implemented, the narrative dull, the progression nonexistent, the character models ugly, the bugs plentiful, the list goes on. This is a game that feels like it belongs in the 2000s with how its super linear design and limited gameplay mechanics work in practice.

In the end, my experience playing The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was disappointing. A creative take on the character's journey interested me prior to its release, but the core concepts should also fall in line with what we've come to expect from the current generation of games. Outdated and plain bad mechanics simply mean that this title, much like the Balrog, should go back into the shadows.

It was always going to be tough to pull off a Gollum game, but there’s simply nothing precious about this amateur stealth adventure. A general lack of refinement lurks in every shadowy corner of LotR: Gollum, a game disappointingly barren of interesting ideas or substantial gameplay. Even the most loyal Lord of the Rings fans will struggle through it. If you value your time, do yourself a favour and avoid it like the Eye of Sauron.

There are more positives – character designs, too, are phenomenal interpretations of Tolkien’s descriptions, and the creepy folk horror vibes of the Mirkwood Elves is inspired – but they’re too few and far between to save this boring game.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum fails to live up to both the Tolkien name and its own potential. From exhausting, repetitive gameplay to a poorly constructed narrative, this is a piece of Middle-earth you should never explore.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum unfortunately didn't turn out to be "my precious" and only rarely manages to captivate. Dramatic bugs and performance problems abound.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a disaster in a way that I sincerely thought wasn’t possible anymore. With so much money on the line, I thought we’d long passed the days where a game as transparently bad as Superman 64 could exist. Popular IPs are like gold in 2023, and companies carefully guard them like protective dragons. And yet, Gollum seems to have slipped by the watchful eye of so many stakeholders undetected. It’s a rare sight in the modern gaming landscape, and one that almost makes me nostalgic for the bad games of my childhood.

A strong sense of character is let down by poor controls, fiddly implementation, and bugs.