The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Review

"My Precious?"

Campaign

June 1, 2023 at 8:50pm
By Jason Stettner

I really do try my best to find some sort of redeeming element when playing games in a reviewing capacity. It’s not always about being negative, or trying to place a point across. Alas, sometimes the experience really is just that bad and thus far, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is the worst game I’ve ever played.

The combination of reaching towards a higher tier level of quality and failing on so many accounts, it’s just disappointing. Match that with a concept that in general is puzzling, and it’s just a terrible time.

To quickly summarize the narrative you spend half the game as Gollum in an Orc slave camp and then the other half in an Elven jail area. It’s not really too inspiring from that perspective, but you do meet great characters such as Frail Old Man or the Blind Elf Lady.

You get to see Gollum have internal struggles within a split perspective that don’t add much and just really a narrative delivered in such a pointless, nonsensical sort of way.

It doesn’t really cohesively flow with poor performances, weak character delivery and mind numbingly mundane gameplay. The first half actually does run one would say; it’s just insanely boring and the latter half is where the real magic, or well problems begin.

Gameplay

I thought this was a good lead into the gameplay aspect, this game barely functions. The second half is just problems stacked on problems. Slipping and dropping too fast, crashing. If you die, crashing. The game won’t load the segment in most scenarios causing you to replay whole chapters.

It’s a mundane exercise in insanity, the second time that phrase has come up within a month as I honestly never thought things could get worse than Redfall but alas here we are. Anyways, it just barely functions. The performance is abysmal on all three graphics settings for Xbox Series X. There’s performance, quality and quality with ray tracing. All have uncapped frame rates, so I guess on a future console it may run decently.

I even morbidly tried out the Xbox Series S, the two modes there are even worse for performance and the Xbox Series X was barely running this as is. There’s also HDR support which does adjust the appearance a tad. Regardless, it looks awful and runs pitifully. There are missing textures, climbing which makes up a lot of the game that barely works and then long loading screens.

In general the game looks generations behind and plays even worse than it looks. It’s frustrating the handle, it’s hard to tell your direction at times despite Gollum vision and it’s just such a blah scenario. You can kind of see that the developers tried their best, but towards the end it genuinely felt like they were trying to punish me for playing their game.

The Conclusion

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. I guess if you fix the crashes, poor textures and numerous problems such as literal scenes not working so you can continue.

You might have something that’s just kind of bad. Right now, it’s terrible and bottom of the barrel garbage. It’s embarrassing that this released as is and I feel bad for all involved. I don’t think I’ll look at Gollum, or The Lord of the Rings the same again.

Maybe there’s a world where this Gollum game was alright, but it’s not the one I reside in currently. I don’t believe there are any redeeming qualities to this one. It’s fetch quests, boring hopping along and poor performances. It’s weird action sequences with low performance and dreadful visuals. It’s weird character choices, bad loading and ever so many crashes.

It’s ugly, bland and somehow they made the Elf environments look atrocious. It carves out weird aspects for extra DLC purchases, it’s just such a weird combination of disappointment. It’s a very, very bad game and I feel deep levels of empathy for those behind the scenes.

You could at times, tell that there was an attempt to make this work and it just doesn’t at any fundamental level. Such a weird time to be had, and I really tried hard to push through this one. The crashing was so bad I had to watch the last twenty minutes of it, as I was livestreaming it through and just gave up as it broke me down.

It was traumatizing quite honestly, The Lord of the Rings deserves better and I know Daedalic is better than this. I wish I had given up playing it far earlier, but I really wanted to try to work through it and it just wasn’t worth the life I spent on it. There are far better things to do with your time.

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The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 0