The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is apparently a hot mess. The narrative-driven stealth game set in-between J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit and the War of the Ring trilogy has garnered some of the lowest review scores I’ve ever seen. One website even decided against reviewing it altogether because it was so wonky to play prior to a launch-day update. How did it all go so wrong?
The Week In Games: High On Witchcraft
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More than a few people scratched their heads when Daedalic Entertainment announced it was making a Lord of the Rings game all about Gollum. The twisted creature turned into a mid-aughts CGI icon thanks to a masterful performance by actor Andy Serkis is not particularly heroic, doesn’t have any cool abilities, and is mostly relegated to a background plot device in the books. But Daedalic and publisher Nacon plunged ahead with a $60 PlayStation and Xbox release anyway. Maybe they shouldn’t have.
I watched snippets of a full playthrough that leaked on YouTube earlier this week which showed graphics that looked markedly worse than what was in some of the promotional images. Most of the action focuses on Gollum platforming around environments while avoiding guards. The second he’s spotted, the screen cuts to black and restarts from a game over. Some of the dialogue and UI fonts, meanwhile, appear to just be Calibri from Microsoft Office.
Gollum currently sits at a 38 on Metacritic for the PS5 version and 43 for the PC version. That puts it just a few points below 2022’s Babylon’s Fall, a live-service loot slasher by Platinum Games that was so disappointing Square Enix shut off the always-online game’s servers just a year later.
“A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien’s fiction,” wrote The Guardian in its review. “Gollum is full of technical problems that make an otherwise unpleasant experience even worse, and the game’s boring story makes it hard to recommend, even to the most hardcore Lord of the Rings fans,” wrote Inverse.
GameSpot gave the game a 2 out of 10, while DigitalTrends refused to even score it. “First time we’ve ever really done this, but the version of Lord of the Rings: Gollum we were given to review on PS5 was so non-functional ahead of its day one patch that we could not dignify it with a scored review in good faith,” tweeted site writer Giovanni Colantonio. Maybe Gollum will get better in post-launch updates. Maybe it won’t. I’m sure the developers working on the game didn’t want things to go this way. In the meantime, here’s what other reviews are saying about possibly the worst Lord of the Rings game ever:
