Original Review
I am honestly shocked at the absolute gall of Nacon to charge $50 for a game of such poor quality. This is an obviously amateur product across every dimension, riddled with so many technical and creative design flaws that the AAA-tier asking price beggars belief. The game looks, sounds, and handles like a student project demonstrating their first legitimate wrangling of Unreal Engine. Games of this calibre are typically free on Steam, which feels like the only appropriate price point for this product.

I'll update this review when I've finished, though I expect my regard for the game will only grow all the more scathing for each passing hour. I leave this thumbs-down in the meantime, in the hopes that it may help ward off prospective buyers.


Post-Completion Update
I guess I should at least list a few of the game's positive points, out of a bounty of good faith. The Gollum video game has some nice environment art, a few good pieces of music, and one Orc voice actor who really killed it with his lines.

Everything else about this game is, unfortunately, irredeemably bad. Awful character models, cumbersome camera movement, jerky animations, low-quality textures, totally borked occlusion silhouettes...from minute one, Gollum gives off a pretty rough vibe, very amateur, very unpolished. And that would be entirely fine, if the game didn't cost $50.

Everything about Gollum feels cheap, from its minimal storybook-style cutscenes, to the way that you ragdoll five feet into a fatal fall and just statically descend in a straight line while lying down as if you'd landed on an invisible floor, to the way that jumping over certain pieces of furniture results in your character awkwardly floating over them in a suspended falling animation. The game's text is rife with typos and grammatical errors, mixed tenses, and informal or contemporary language jarringly inserted into in-universe lore entries and recaps.

Facial animations are stiff and abruptly revert to neutral positions when a line of dialogue ends; plenty of character actions and game events have no accompanying SFX; the poorly implemented motion blur can't be disabled (unless they've since patched this); low draw distance, massive pop-in, constant frame hitches, the list of technical problems goes on and on and on.

You are presented with all of these problems before you even begin to play the game, a fresh nightmare unto itself. Gollum handles poorly in all regards: jumps will often careen out of control, there is minimal to no mid-air course correction, the pre-pathed climbing controls are abysmal, and even your default movement speed is pitifully slow. If you jump while climbing a ladder and nearing the top, Gollum will spring up wildly into the air in a directly vertical line, and then fall straight back down onto the ladder. It's difficult to articulate how completely bizarre this looks and feels in context.

This is a stealth game which places a single viable tool into your toolkit: throwing rocks to distract guards. It is a platformer in which your stamina bar runs out in about a second and a half, and returns at an excruciating rate. Certain paths for jumps seem to have been designated as the "correct" path, and the trajectory of any adjacent jump will crazily whiplash to adhere to them. This game's resolute eschewals of the design sensibilities dutifully accrued across three decades of industry exploration in 3D platforming are as ruinous as they are grimly hilarious.

I want to return for a moment to the game's technical woes, because they are both innumerable and worthy of contemplation.

- Around a third of the lines in the game had no accompanying lip-sync animations during my playthrough
- Objective markers jittered wildly when moved to the screen border
- Lighting effects often displayed fully through opaque barriers
- Some in-game cutscene camera angles qwre bugged, and entire scenes were blocked by a T-posing NPC or piece of the environment
- SFX or voice lines that were playing prior to a death often persisted through to my next spawn
- The faces on certain Elf NPCs were severely distorted during speech, with eyebrows and eyelids grotesquely pulling back inside the skull of the character
- Several dialogue trees incorrectly displayed the same prompt for every option on screen
- Multiple dialogue options enacted nothing when selected; Gollum simply stared blankly at the camera for 10-15 seconds, and then the scene continued
- During many parts of the game, skipping dialogue lines did not cut off the previous line - it simply continued to play overtop of the next line of dialogue. This effect could be compounded ad nauseam to experience true madness
- I encountered many cutscenes where the currently speaking NPC de-rendered, existing only as a disembodied voice
- Several platforms in the Riddlemaster's quarters don't seem to have been properly engineered. You're clearly supposed to jump off of these platforms to go higher, but only a very small subarea of each platform can be jumped from. The jump button does nothing when you are standing anywhere else on the platform
- I encountered several instances where my character became stuck inside the geometry of underwater obstacles, soft-locking me and forcing a restart
- On more than one occasion, NPCs got stuck bumping into each other on the way out of my prison cell, and became unable to proceed through the doorway. This also trapped me in the cell, forcing a restart

Do not think this scouring of the game's many failures will be limited to the technical side of things. The issues I've listed above, and even my more general complaints about the game's overall "cheap" feel, could theoretically be addressed by arduous post-launch support. But The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is rotten to its very bones, for many more reasons than I've enumerated above. Paywalled emotes in a single-player title are already enough to make my skin crawl, but locking a Sindarin voice pack behind Day 1 DLC strikes me as much worse - especially because, as I understand, this DLC barely adds more than a handful of lines. This is content that was finished at launch, and should have been included for the base price.

Still more issues gnaw at this corpse of a game. The first three chapters could have been an intro cutscene or text summary; you do nothing but rote chores, barely advancing any existing plotlines. Gollum also features an underbaked "companion" system during certain levels, and it is always to the player's detriment. A mid-game chase sequence with a large monster is implemented as a bottom-of-the-barrel quality Banjo Kazooie segment that goes on for way too long and features a maddeningly short music sample on loop - and then, after a short platforming section, you go through the exact same ordeal again.

Most of the marketing material for this game advertised it as an adventure that spans the breadth of Middle Earth, starring Gollum and a mysterious Elf companion. But the game is 10 chapters long, and you don't really leave Mordor until Chapter 7.

Gollum bears all the pockmarks of a project that was clearly developed under extreme duress, and I feel great sympathy for the dev team at Daedalic. Any ridicule they have been targeted with is severely misdirected.

Management and publishing, on the other hand, were out of their minds to release this game - and it's a shame, because I am given to understand that Daedalic has previously held a reasonably good reputation for their point-and-click adventure games. And now, as a result of this wild, reckless negligence, their development wing has been shut down entirely, and talented developers have lost their jobs.

I would end this review by saying "Gollum is a terrible video game," but that is inaccurate - because The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not a video game. It is a monument to the sins of man.

They takes it from us, Precious! Tricksy hobbitses stoles our money! GOLLUM. GOLLUM.

Throw it into the fire, Precious! Smash it with a rockses! Misery! Misery! Curse Daedalic. Curse it and crush it! We hates it! We hates it forever! Spoiling nice story. No rest for poor Smeagol.

Fell into the lava in the pit and closed the gameses. Gollum is FREE.

Unlike most reviews i have actually played it to the end, so buckle up and let me tell you about my suffering.

When i heard that Daedalic got the rights to LOTR i was so excited. For i have played a number of their Point and Click adventures and they are master storytellers. And they decided to tell the story of the most tragic character (Apart from Húrin and his family) in the entire Legendarium.

So what in Ilúvatar's name happened!?

First of the game runs at least for me but i see a lot of people having huge performance issues. But this cannot redeem the awful controls and platforming. Movement is so stiff and prepare to die a lot from falling. I also encountered quite a number of bugs like getting stuck on terrain, not willing to grab ledges and most hilarious and frustrating of all A wheel that i was supposed to jump on totally defining the laws of physics and just disappearing into the wall.

But Daedalic are great at making stories i think back at Chains of Satinav and Memoria so i pushed forward. But more than half of the game is spend in the dungeons Barad-Dûr bearly moving the plot onward. Characters are gone as soon as they appear and have no depth to them. It teases you and when it starts getting interesting it's over. For example there is an old man in your cell and you discover he was a Haradrim king and thats it you will never see him again. And you spend much of your time doing just boring tasks for your masters. The reason for my focus on this part is that we already have a game that did this so much better. In The Lord of the Rings Online if you make a Stout-Axe character you start in thralldom in the Dark Tower together with your fellow clan members You get a short idea how your life goes and do mundane tasks until word gets out that a certain prisoner of the dark lord is set to be released, a riot breaks out and you escape. All this takes about 15-20 Min if you do not skip the dialogue But here it is the majority of the game. And ones you get out of Mordor you skip right to you imprisoned in Mirkwood. (No you do not get to see Aragorn hunt you) And for some reason the Elves are very cold and mean against you. This is so strange as in fact in the book the elves took pity on Gollum. There is a lot to say about the bafeling story decisions but this review would be an novel in itself.

The last time I was so disappointed with a game was Stronghold 3 many years ago and this might be the worst game of the year. I just wish that Daedalic would have played it simple for their first venture into my favorite fantasy universe and made a Point and Click of The Hobbit

It was tricksy, precious. Very tricksy. They stole it from us. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false! Sixty Dollars they did. Cruel men hurts us. Master tricksed us. Master broke his promise. Master betrayed us. Wicked. Tricksy, False. Oh, yes, my precious. We’re not in decent places. Yes, perhaps, yes. Our only wish, to play a game, so juicy sweet. No. Not very nice at all, my love. Curse the Baggins! It’s gone! What has it got in its pocketses? Oh we guess, we guess, my precious. We guess my sixty dollars. Yes! my precious! Lost! My precious is LOOOOSSST!

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will go down in history as one of the worst, most broken and most disappointing games released by a proper games studio in the past 20 years.

I've played worse £1 shovelware and random asset flips but I genuinely can't remember the last time I played a AA priced game this fundamentally awful. If it was a budget £15 - £20 full price game, I could probably overlook some of it less glaring issues but it's £43 with a £52 "precious" edition and I'm going to review it as such.

- The gameplay is shallow and extremely repetitive.
- The story makes absolutely no sense.
- The background visuals actually aren't that bad but the character models are straight out of an early 2007 PS3 game. Gollum himself is easily the worst model in the game for some reason.
- The voice acting is so-so it's not offensively bad or notably good for the most part... except Gollum. No offence to whoever did the VA but it sounds like someone down at the local pub trying a Gollum impersonation after a few pints.
- The game is 10-12 hours long, I'd argue about 90% of this "play" time is padding, 90%+ of this game is filler.
- The enemy AI is basic at best and brain dead at worse.
- Stealth gameplay is very mixed due to the inconsistency of the AI, sometimes you can sneak right past them while others they notice you exceptionally quickly.
- The climbing is horrible, at times broken and is sadly most of the gameplay. You WILL die while climbing a lot and it will absolutely be the games fault 9/10 times.
- Did I mention how horrible Gollum looks in LoTR: Gollum? Cause it really is something which needs to be seen to be believed.
- Bugs, Gollum has lots and lots of bugs, most are small like Gollum's model bugging out on death or refusing to grab a ledge while climbing and others are unacceptable game breaking issues. For example at the end of ch 8 I somehow missed the cut-scene trigger after returning from the haze and was stuck wandering around the grove for 20 minutes before reloading the checkpoint and then there's the mirror in chapter 9 which seems to be guaranteed to softlock Gollum in place every single time and it requires a work around to continue the game.
- The dlc is a disgrace, whoever decided to put elvish VA and the bloody lore compendium behind a paywall should be sacked.

There's probably more to complain about but Gollum is so mind-numbingly boring that I can't remember a lot of the game.

+ The schizo arguments between smeagol and Gollum are actually quite interesting, if it was more fleshed out and in a better game it could be good.
+ The checkpoints are very generous for the most part, to help balance how horrible the gameplay is and how often the climbing will kill you.
+ The 1st 2-3 hours the game is funny bad ... then it just gets bad.

2/10 but i'm going to take another point away for the unacceptable dlc practice.

1/10. Genuinely one of the worst games I have ever played.

This is the modern day E.T. for the Atari.

we hateses it :-(

This isn't a game.

This isn't an experience.

This isn't even a torture test for your PC.

It's a torture test for the games industry as a whole, to see how much BS We're willing to put up with with these garbage companies milking us for all we're worth.


(EDIT) Crikey people don't pay attention;

Jesus people REALLY can't read, let me clarify FURTHER

V-Someone said this to me in the comments (I didn't say that)
I hope you become homeless so that you can't ever spend money on games again. You are the ♥♥♥♥ problem idiot.
I'm a YouTuber, so I played this game for content. It's my fulltime job.

V-Someone said this to me in the comments (I didn't say that)
why did you buy it man?? you can understand how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game is from youtube lmao

A viewer pre-ordered this for me because they were very excited to watch me play it, and they also refused a refund.

V-Someone said this to me in the comments (I didn't say that)
Reviewer played 3 hours of it after the 0.3h review and is now uneligible for a refund.

Let that sink in..

See above.


Facts are, this game just isn't really fun... I feel bad for whoever is replying to all these reviews because performance patches and gameplay changes cannot and will not make a game about performing inane puzzles as a creature and effectively being a "Work Simulator" with very little to no context in the world of Tolkein fun or engaging.

I have no idea why it shows up as a key received, maybe because it was gifted?

Anyway, I posted this review as a funny but "real" review of the games industry live on stream, didn't expect it to blow up like this nor for people to get hurt by my playtime/purchasing habits.

I overpaid

30 years of gaming this is the worst game iv ever played