I think it’s fair to say that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum captured the headlines for all the wrong reasons on its debut with bugs, performance issues, an erratic camera and unreliable controls. Now on its latest 1.3 patch, I’m finally able to test the game on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S – but even with the extra attention, I haven’t played a game in such a dire state for a tech review for a long time. At least not since Shadow of Mordor way back in 2014 on PS3, an infamous porting disaster.
Gollum is fundamentally flawed in ways that go way beyond its frame-rate, which isn’t great. The game design is almost taken straight from the dark ages of PS2 movie license tie-ins – an era where movie franchises were invariably turned into 3D platformers with awkward controls, a disastrous camera, and in the worst cases, bugs, bugs and more bugs. Given that, the £50/$60 price is inexcusable – but there’s still some interest to be found in examining exactly what’s gone wrong here.
Daedelic Entertainment first announced Gollum in 2019 – an Unreal Engine project with some interesting ideas – a mixture of stealth, 3D platforming and a good versus evil judgement system. For the stealth sections you use shadows and bushes to crawl past enemy orcs, while in platforming bits you navigate caves by clambering up walls, often with mundane goals like pillaging ID tags from dead orcs. Beyond its technical failings, which we’ll get onto shortly, the biggest gameplay issue is in terms of its visual design. It’s often difficult to see where to go next in murky caves, to judge whether a nearby wall is climbable or whether it’ll lead to Gollum plummeting to their doom.
