The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

After two years of postponement for one reason or another, the adventure and stealth game “The Lord of the Rings: Gollum” was recently released on PC as well as home devices from Microsoft and Sony. With the title of The Lord of the Rings and the characters and stories in its world, it was strange to specifically choose the Gollum character. What is the purpose of the game? This game? Is there an interesting story behind this choice? This is what we tell you in this test report.

The game’s story takes place between the events of the novels “The Hobbits” and “The Fellowship of the Ring” and focuses on the famous character, who oscillates between his evil, hostile identity, Gollum, and his original identity, which appears weak and poor, Smeagol. The character tries to search for Bilbo Baggins to recover the famous ring he stole from her, and during the search it turns out that Gollum is captured and imprisoned by the ogres. Here the focus is on the years Gollum spent in hard work and the events that followed. The game’s story requires you to know a little about the Lord of the Rings world, or at least the most well-known characters, in order to understand many of the conversations. From time to time there were interesting moments that we thought would lead to the revelation of important facts or enrich the world of the novel, but this was not the case. Unfortunately, throughout the entire experience we were curious as to why the development team was telling this story? All of the events that take place in this adventure do not really add to the player’s knowledge of the world of the Lord of the Rings, and the story itself loses its tension factor when interesting moments meet frustrating moments that can be justified as mere filler, um to extend the lifespan of the experience, and nothing more. So what’s the point?

Technical Aspect

When it comes to the technical aspect, the game seems specific to the generation before last, in terms of character designs, facial expressions or animations, as if it came from that era. Perhaps the only element that was well presented on the technical level are the environments in the game, since the artistic direction does not tend towards realism, but rather… It has a strange cartoon approach and many of the environments that correspond to this trend have been with some beautifully presented simple melodies playing in the background. The subpar technical level is not the only problem in this regard, as the game is full of technical problems, some of which are purely technical in nature, such as: Such as the fact that the character does not interact with the environment in the desired way, and the fact that this may be the case or the artificial intelligence stops working, and the most annoying problem was the game’s lack of interaction when the player carried out a required thing. This caused us to replay some missions due to such problems in order to be able to complete them. There are more technical problems that we will talk about when we talk about the related part of the game.

Gameplay Experience

Speaking of the gameplay experience, the game is, as already mentioned, an adventure and infiltration experience, divided into parts of jumping between platforms and climbing to reach a certain objective or sneaking past enemies. Here the game surprised us by saying that the gaming experience itself comes from games from two generations ago. The movement and jumping mechanisms between platforms are very primitive and have many problems. One of the technical problems is that the character does not react to the player in the desired way and even in the case of the desired reaction, the distance the character can jump varies randomly, which always leads to annoying falls. In addition, the design of the steps is generally poor, which you will notice when climbing and jumping between… Platforms are characterized by the fact that some elements of the environment are often inconveniently placed, making accessing them with limited control a confusing one task does.

Infiltration Experience

As for the infiltration experience, it’s limited to hiding in the grass or in a dark area so that the enemies don’t see you, with the option of throwing rocks at certain elements in the environment to draw their attention to them steer Some enemies who don’t wear helmets are suffocated, and their numbers are few. Technical problems also played their part here. Some enemies can arrest the player, and if you reload from the last save point that is close to the enemy, you will realize that he knows your location and will arrest you immediately! This issue resulted in us having to redo some stages entirely as it prevented progress at all.

Character Choices

One of the few nice ideas that the game presents is that you can deal with situations as a Gollum or Smaegol character, and this varies between reacting to some conversations with the characters that don’t really change the experience, and between crucial decisions Some events in the experience, and this type of decision requires you to persuade… The character’s second identity, along with presenting a number of options that require some thinking to figure out which option is best for persuasion suitable is. If your option is not effective, the second party will persuade and force you to follow his decision. Normally, persuasion requires you to win three out of five dialogues, but even that aspect of the experience affected him. Technical problems, although rare, were annoying because of their impact on decisions. Sometimes in the middle of a debate where you’re winning, and before you win, the game will surprise you by telling you that the other party won the debate, even though they didn’t win any dialogue!

Design and Side Content

The design of the game sections is very linear and doesn’t offer much freedom of exploration or movement. As for the side content, there are some collectibles that are so cleverly placed that it’s easy to not notice them as you move closer to your destination, and the game doesn’t offer much value for real replay considering the amount of technical issues . What you suffer from is the monotonous and flawed process of jumping and sneaking. We finished the experience in 13 hours and we can confidently advise you to stay away from this game. Even though the only benefit of our review is to advise you to steer clear, that’s more than enough. Given what this experience offers, even with all of its technical issues addressed, the benefits and enjoyment are almost non-existent.