The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

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.

Daedalic's long-delayed Tolkienian adventure is just as unlikeable and tragic as its namesake protagonist.

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

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

Much like its title character, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is compromised, inelegant, and a bit of an eyesore. To everyone except the most fervent of Tolkienites; you shall pass.

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 offers reason to push past the frustration. As a longtime fan of Tolkien’s fiction, it’s possible that I liked the game even less for the way it seemed to misuse the source material. It’s hard to have a more damning indictment than to say that this Gollum game isn’t for fans of The Lord of the Rings, but here we are.

A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien's fiction

It's unfortunate, but The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum fails to expand the world of Middle-earth in any meaningful way. There are glimmers of something good(ish) in there, but it's suffocated by a disjointed story, awkward controls and dull stealth.

That’s the real problem with Gollum: It’s a game of contradictions. It wants to be a precision platformer, but the platforming is imprecise and unpredictable. It wants to be a stealth game, but the sneaky mechanics are uninspired and enemy AI is too dumb to make it challenging. It wants to be an action game, but Gollum doesn’t have the strength to engage in any real action. And on top of these contradictions is the crushing weight of bugs that break the game. There’s potential tucked deep within the bones of Daedalic Entertainment’s game, but The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is giving bad early-aughts 3D platformer in the worst way imaginable, putting it in the running for 2023's worst game.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a broken mess of a game. There are barely any redeeming qualities to be found amidst what can only be described as a massive missed opportunity. There is some serious potential in a single-player linear Lord of the Rings experience like this, but with outrageously dated level design, clunky controls, a severe lack of polish, muddy and unimpressive graphics, and a dull story, Gollum completely misses the mark. As massive fans of the books, films, and games, it's sad to see that there is nothing precious about this experience.