Part of the problem lies with having Gollum himself as the protagonist. He’s got drive, and as a fellow fan of sparkly jewellery, I can respect that.īut drive isn't enough to redeem the turgid adventure that follows. He wants his shiny preciousness back, after all, and will do anything it takes to get it.

He’s got it rough, but Gollum perseveres. He does eventually make it to the beautiful Woodland Realm in Mirkwood, but the Elven king Thranduil (aka Legolas' hot dad) and his army don’t treat him very nicely, so that doesn’t turn out very well either. Put simply, the story runs parallel to the events in The Fellowship of the Ring, but instead of prancing through Hobbiton and ogling at Rivendell, Gollum is mostly burning to a crisp within the bowels of Barad-dûr in fiery Mordor. The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum takes place after Bilbo finds the ring, but before Frodo and Sam’s run-in with our grimy gremlin. Playing it for more than 30-minutes at a time would make me feel unsettled, prompting some kind of feral need to scoop my brain out of my skull. Just as the ring corrupted Sméagol, playing Gollum has made me a husk of a human being, a twisted and bitter shadow of what I used to be. The bottom line here, folks, is that Gollum is not good. I don’t like being mean about games, but I do like being honest about games, and, yeesh, is The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum putting me between a rock and a hard place.

Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-10750H, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, 16GB RAM, Windows 10.

From: Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic Games Store.Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment, Nacon.There are glimmers of something good(ish) in there, but it's suffocated by a disjointed story, awkward controls and dull stealth. It’s unfortunate, but The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum fails to expand the world of Middle-earth in any meaningful way.

Lord of the rings: gollum reddit