Pedz ReviewZ: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

I’ll preface this by stating outright that I am not a fan of The Lord of the Rings, I have never read the books, and didn’t particularly enjoy the films and in fact fell asleep during my first viewing of The Two Towers. I’ve not decided to review Gollum for some affection to Lord of the Rings, so I’m neither disappointed by being a fan nor happy to get more Gollum, as again, I’m not a fan.

Shall we get started? Gollum is a third-person action-adventure game that takes place at some point during Gollum’s life after The Hobbit and before Lord of the Rings, well I think, anyway. During this time Gollum or Smeagol is minding his own business in his mountain lair and then he gets captured and tortured by Orcs, while all this happens Gollum is forced to do menial tasks like collecting numbers from dead bodies of other slaves and clearing out some tunnels with bombs. For the first third of the game, it feels pretty pointless, you aren’t really doing much. Don’t get me wrong you do make your way around the place you are being held captive, but because you are being forced to do such pointless tasks it feels very much like a chore.

As you progress you do get more of an interesting story, well, compared to ‘Oi, you! go clean up some poop’ You meet other characters that appear throughout the game, and this is where the game improves slightly. You go from herding animals to escaping from your prison.

The platforming in the game isn’t too bad, like it works, it’s nothing special but it is functional enough, there are issues with sometimes not knowing where to jump as sometimes you can’t see where you are meant to leap to or you think there’s a ledge you can grab, vault to it and plummet to your death. Gollum also has heightened senses, meaning you can press a button to highlight enemies and the path. Still, the path sometimes isn’t shown so you are left to gauge where you need to go at times which wouldn’t be an issue really as many games can be trial and error, but this feels silly due to the aforementioned issues of places seeming possible to use during the platform and them turning out not to be, and it happens fairly often. Even times when you can follow the path it becomes awkward to line up the jump, more so with backward jumps where you miss the platform by a small margin and go past them or even over them. More tweaking was needed to get these aspects correct.

The stealth sections are rather uninteresting as well. It’ll sound daft but there are many, many stealth sections during the game and they all seem to be the same. OK, not entirely the same, locations and enemies will change, but from very early on these sections don’t progress in any meaningful or mechanical way, once you’ve done the first few all of them have the same structure. It would’ve been better if you had more options as you progressed and all that was available was hiding in shadow, throwing rocks at a metal thing to distract enemies and killing the occasional enemy that didn’t have a helmet on. It lacks any real depth and flatlines from the third stealth section onwards.

Visually the game can look half-decent, at least with enviroments. Now they aren’t amazing and 80% of the game is set underground so it’s mostly caves or ruinus structures, but for a chapter or 2 you get to see outside in the daytime and it looks nice there. Character models, on the other hand, look pretty awful, kind of like bad sculptures or some weird clay abominations, the music was alright. There’s some good music, and the voice acting is OK, though I did enjoy Gollum, but the sound effects were a little odd and tiny? sounding.

I’ll be honest, I think a lot of the backlash for this game is due to the awful way the game monetised things including the My Precious emote. but putting that aside looking solely at the game, I’d be hard-pressed to give it a good score, even an average score would be a push, because the game is generally pretty bad, with the mediocre platforming, the the lack of signposting and difficulty working out what is a bloody platform or ledge you can use to the mundane first half of busy work, it just all adds up to a bad game.