The Lord of the Rings - Gollum

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

Daedalic knew how to make the adventure part work – and it does work, more or less – but everything else screams “amateur hour” so hard, it borders on naïve art. [Issue#262, p.64]

The Lord of the Rings Gollum is a limited installment that would have more potential as a visual novel. On a mechanical level, it requires much work to be entertaining. On the other hand, the scenarios and landscapes do not fit in the game. The title was a great challenge and needed to meet the players' minimum expectations on several levels. However, the story and some colorful winks coupled with specific movements may need some optimizations to be an enjoyable game.

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 The unpublished portion of the story is not up to Tolkien's saga and the playful phases are imprecise and obsolete.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.

There is no point in beating around the bush, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a big disappointment. Despite starting from interesting narrative premises, Daedalic Entertainment's adventure appears extremely dated in every aspect and its best moments are the least original ones, proving how the whole system was realized under the sign of a sketchy, inconclusive and confusing game design, which moreover does not redeem itself even on the technical level and on PC in particular offers a really sad spectacle.