Often times, an event or character can have profound implications for its core narrative, but isn’t the right choice for its own dedicated spotlight project. It’s hard to think of a more powerful case than The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a game that fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of its source franchise, focusing on a character who, by almost any measure, Se, is the wrong choice for a lead. , That said, it’s not impossible to imagine a game that somehow clicked the unusual premise. This is not that project; Like its pathetic and pathetic lead, this game is best avoided at all costs.
Gollum tracks the story of the Titanic companion in the intervening time period the hobbit And Lord of the Rings, mostly in pursuit of his precious ring during his slavery and abuse in Mordor and the associated escape. With its drab colors, brutal and unlikable characters, and focus on action-oriented gameplay, it feels at odds with most of the core principles and themes of Tolkien’s narrative. Even stripped of its connection to that tortured mythology, the story’s storytelling is poor, horrifying, and often inconsistent. A promising exploration of the dichotomy between the Gollum and Sméagol character initially sounds compelling but is never leveraged in a meaningful way.
Gameplay is mainly split between old-fashioned linear traversal sequences and clumsy, uninteresting stretches of stealth. In the navigation of the stages, jumping is not accurate, the stages are poorly structured to communicate where you can go, and the camera is unwieldy, or sometimes broken, flipped completely upside down when climbing doing or refusing to rotate to see the next required jump. I died by jumping over and over again on what should have been easy or mistakenly guessed where the next platform could be reached. The only small blessing are frequent checkpoints to soften the blow of endless repetition.
While terrifying, I longed for those platforming sequences every time the game turned into one of its bountiful stealth sequences. Unlike any modern stealth game, Gollum doesn’t have any interesting tricks or equipment to enrich these passages. Instead, the slippery hero can only slip past the shadows of stupid guards, on paths where it’s hard to know if you’ll be seen. No sense of ownership or control over the environment emerges. Again, the reactions are stable. Whenever the game asked me if I wanted to reload at the last checkpoint, it just had the will to continue.
Technical problems and poor implementation abound. Sound mixing often makes voices difficult to hear. Character faces (with the exception of Gollum) are poorly animated or not animated at all. The onscreen figures move in perfect sync with each other, as seen in early PS2 games. The texture is muddy and there is a lack of detail. More than once, the game demanded an objective that did not function or appeared and did not respond to checkpoint restarts; Only redoing the entire level will fix the problem.
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 provides a reason to vent frustration. As a longtime fan of Tolkien’s narrative, it’s possible that I liked the game even less for the way it misused the source material. It’s hard to find a more damning indictment than to say this Gollum game isn’t for fans. Lord of the RingsBut here we are.