The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™

Review

The game begins with you as Gollum, locked away in a dark Elvish prison cell. You soon have visitors: the Eleven King and Gandalf. The Elven King tells Gandalf that someone had tortured him long before the Dúnadan found him, and it is suspected that he has been to Mordor. Beyond the Elven borders darkness spreads and Gollum cannot stay among them.

However, Gandalf wishes to know Gollum’s story.  Why did Gollum change direction after going east, tracing Bilbo Baggins’ footsteps from some sixty years prior but then, upon reaching the Lonely Mountains, deciding to head south? No Hobbit would have willingly gone that way, and the “Precious” that Gollum so desires to have returned to him would not be found in those lands, the Land of Shadows. So, what calls Gollum to those lands, whispering on the winds, calling his name? Gandalf needs to know. It is from here that Gollum's story will unfold...

You’ve spent time hidden away in an old cave in the Misty Mountains, out of sight from the ever-watching eye. The cave once had a filthy Orc living there but now it’s your hiding spot; however, the eye has many spies. It is one of those spies which makes you leave the safety of the cave and chase it down before it can report back to its master. You chase after the spy, which is a black Raven, however there are Orc roaming the mountain, so you’ll have to sneak around the place out of sight, staying in the shadows and using the environment to your benefit.

Moving through plants, you can hide from the patrolling Orcs. To move around your environment you must climb, drop down and jump to new areas from ledges and walls, you can also run along certain walls or swing from bars. Shadows will also help you move around, although sometimes you will have to create darkness and shadows by using stones to close lanterns. These will give you time to move in the dark and pass by the enemy, but the enemy will soon re-light the lanterns, so you’ll have to move fast. If you get caught, then it will be game over and you will have to restart from the last checkpoint.

At certain points in the game, you will have to make choices, causing you to debate with yourself, “Do you go with Gollum’s thinking, or do you go with Smeagol?” After making your choice, you will have to persuade the other personality to agree with your choice. Once agreed, the decision will be made and the action decided upon will happen.

After chasing the spy, you get caught and are sent to mines where you will have to carry out various jobs, all while gaining clues which can help you escape this place.

If you find yourself stuck, Gollum does have a vision which can help show you the way. However, I did find this extremely frustrating, as most of the time when I needed its help, it would not show me the path I needed to take.  At times, I could see where I had been but never where I wanted to go. There’s a cursor that indicates the position of your objective, but it does not show you how to get there. So, I would have to progress by trial and error to find which way I needed to go, which entailed dying over and over again.

I’ve never played a game where I have died so much! I don’t mind dying but the reasons for dying most of the time were for silly things. There’s this one time when you must set some barrels alight and escape before they blow up, however, after lighting the barrels, you are unsure where to go. I’d try finding which way to go without any luck, I even used Gollum’s vision but still no joy.

Then I would spot somewhere which looked like it could be an escape, so I’d run towards it and there would pop up an action, Press Q to view. So, as I reached the edge, I pressed Q thinking it was going to save me with a video clip or something. This did not happen, although it did load the view of the area as intended (this feature can be found throughout the game). So, I was totally bamboozled as to where to go, as you only have seconds to escape.  So I went to YouTube to find the answer. I found the answer but that just left me shaking my head in disbelief; I was right about going to the viewpoint, however, before reaching it and being able to Press Q a video clip would start showing Gollum making the jump into a passing cart. This didn’t happen to me and it’s silly things like this which left me frustrated a lot and dying even more.

Sometimes while crawling along the floor trying to get underneath a table to hide from a  passing enemy, I was unable to stop moving forward, which resulted in me getting caught and dying. Trying to drop down on a ledge wouldn’t work at times, so I’d move closer and just fall off! So many silly deaths. Then there are the deaths I suffered because the game would stutter or lag for a couple seconds at a time and then the screen would spin as you catch up.

The graphical and performance issues occurred early in the game, and I did have everything cranked to max with RXT and DLSS set to Quality. I later turned RTX off and the issues seemed to get better as I progressed through the game. It wasn’t perfect but it was a lot better than earlier on.

I’ve enjoyed playing the game, especially the further I got into it.  Even though the game has its problems, is it as bad as some say? I don’t believe so. I would have loved to have had graphics like this back in the PS1 days!  Personally, I think the graphics are good and even better with RXT on, maxed out on Epic settings and HDR turned on.

Hopefully they can sort the performance issues out sooner rather than later as I would like to play without the problems.

In the options there are settings for Graphics (Graphic Preset, Display Mode, Resolution, Vertical Sync, Gamma Correction, Anti-Aliasing, Shadow Quality, Texture Quality, Texture Streaming, View Distance, Visual Effects Quality, Gollum Hair Simulation, Ray Tracing Mode, Upscaler Type, Nvidia DLSS Mode, Nvidia DLAA, Sharpness, Nvidia Relex Low Latency, Frame Generation), Controls (Camera Sensitivity X and Y, Invert Camera Y-Axis, Crouching, Running and Vibration), Interface (Text Language - English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese and Korean), Sound (Master, Music, Sound Effects and Speech Volume Sliders), Key Bindings (Keyboard and Mouse) and Controller - Profiles and Button Layout.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™ Steam Store Page