Sometimes an event or character can have a profound impact on the original fiction, but isn’t the right choice for a Spotlight project of its own. There are few examples more compelling than The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a game that fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of its original franchise and focuses on a character who is in almost every way the wrong choice to star. Still, it’s not impossible to imagine the game that would have somehow made the unusual premise ring. This isn’t that project; Just like its miserable and pathetic main character, this game should be avoided at all costs.
Gollum follows the story of the title grantee in the time in between The Hobbit
The gameplay is mostly split between old-fashioned linear traversal sequences and clumsy, uninteresting stealth sections. When navigating the stages, the jumping is imprecise, the stages are poorly structured to communicate where to go, and the camera is unwieldy or even broken at times, completely turning or not turning around when climbing to see the next necessary jump. I died repeatedly and frequently from jumps that should have been easy, or from the wrong assumption of where to reach the next platform. The only small blessing is frequent checkpoints to soften the punch of endless reps.
While it was awful, I found myself craving those platforming sequences every time the game switched to one of its many stealth sequences. Unlike any modern stealth game, Gollum has no interesting tricks or tools to enrich these passages. Instead, the slippery protagonist can only slip through the shadows, past immeasurably dimwitted guards, down paths where you can hardly know if you’re being seen. There is no feeling of domination or control over the environment. Again, the respawns are constant. Whenever the game asked me if I wanted to reload to the last checkpoint, it was a willpower to keep going.
There are numerous technical problems and poor implementation. Due to the sound mixing, voices are often difficult to understand. Character faces (with the exception of Gollum) are animated poorly or not at all. The characters on screen move in perfect sync with each other, as seen in early PS2 games. Textures are muddy and details are lacking. More than once the game required an objective that didn’t work or appeared and didn’t reappear on a checkpoint restart; Just replaying the entire level would fix the problem.
I had constant problems with the controls, camera, and objectives as they were presented to me. And nothing about the story or characters of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum encourages you to leave the frustration behind. As a longtime fan of Tolkien’s fiction, I may have disliked the game even more for its apparent abuse of the source material. There can hardly be a more damning indictment than saying that this Gollum game is not for fans of Lord of the Ringsbut here we are.
