Gollum review: Lord of the Rings game is far from precious

radiotimes.com:

It brings us no great pleasure to say that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, the new game from Daedalic Entertainment that claims to offer the 'untold story' of everyone's favourite split-personality former Stoor Hobbit, is very bad.

Reviewing a bad game is never easy, unless you're the type of person that thrives on hurling insults, and this reviewer is finding it particularly difficult. That's because, in another life, pre-pandemic, we visited the offices in Hamburg where Gollum was made. We walked through the rows of desks, we saw the computers, we met some of the hard-working developers who have poured their time and effort into this project for years.

But there's no getting around it, sadly. Despite years of work from the team at Daedalic Entertainment, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is one of the worst games in recent memory. It's hard to pick a least-favourite thing about it when we have so many frustrations.

On paper, the idea must have sounded interesting in its initial pitch meeting. This was designed to be a stealth game that is almost entirely combat-free. It would retell one of the best-loved stories of all time, JRR Tolkien's main Lord of the Rings books, from the perspective of one of the most unique characters in fantasy history.

At some point, though, in between the game's numerous delays, it seems like something went very wrong. The graphics are poor, the levels are overly linear, and overall the Gollum game feels like a cheap knock-off that belongs on a previous generation of hardware. And even if it had come out in the early 2000s or whatever, it wouldn't have been considered good.

Wherever you look, you'll see corners that have been cut, seemingly in the name of just getting this game out the door so