Lord Of The Rings: Gollum Is The Worst Game Of The DECADE!

This is an abomination that should have never of happened. Lord of the Rings: Gollum may very well be one of the worst games ever made as literally every aspect of the title is done in the poorest way possible.

Is there any way to throw this game into the fires of Mount Doom…and maybe Daedalic Entertaiment along with it?

Lord of the Rings: Gollum might very well be the worst game I’ve ever played as it not only acts as a glorified Mount Doom prison simulator and has the graphics of a PS1 game, but it also was originally priced at $70! And, no, I’m not kidding about that price.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a larger disparity between how a game was promoted and priced to how the game actually ended up being in the history of gaming. And I mean that wholeheartedly.

Gollum has some of the worst graphics, the cheapest, laziest landscape design, the most mundane plot (if you can even call it that), the absolute DUMBEST gaming mechanics every designed, an outrageously boring combat system, and just a general useless founding premises ever in a game.

Truthfully, there’s no reason this game should ever have left the brainstorming table, let alone get turned over to the developers and designers and then shipped out to the mass public, and Daedalic Entertainment, the studio behind this game, really needs a hard look at itself and its business practices.

As, if this is the kind of game they’re making and charging $70 for in 2023, then the developer should take itself out of business. The game is that bad.

The literal plot of this game is complete weird jail chores for the Orc guards, become the cell boss and take control of this wimpish human prisoner, breed a bird to keep as a pet, become subservient to some fictious, non-Tolkien character called The Candleman and learn about his boring sob story, sneak around Barad-dûr and escape without having any of the original progress count towards anything, see your friend get killed by Shelob, journey around Mirkwood, start a doom-driven simp romance with a blind she-elf (no, I’m not making that up), kill The Candleman when he attacks Mirkwood, and then get stuck in the Mines of Moria.

Remember, everything I just described is you as Gollum.

So, yes, Gollum became the alpha boss of a Mordor jail, he breeds birds to be his companions, he whipped around a human slave, and he got into a simp romance with a blind she-elf. It’s incredible how dumb this plot truly is, and how human beings getting paid came up with this game.

Still, the actual gameplay is even worse as Gollum and everything else in the world constantly glitches, some lines of dialogue aren’t even recorded, a large part of the game is lazily coded/designed to the point you don’t even see half of the main plot and story consequences, you can’t attack anyone aside from jumping on them from behind (which is reasonable for Gollum but makes for poor gameplay), the voice acting is so dull, the environment puzzles are poorly placed and barley make sense half the time, and the mechanics for moving Gollum hardly work.

I can’t tell you all the times I tried running but the game had Gollum jump or I was trying to move a puzzle in direction X, but the game moved it in direction Y. It happened over and over and over and over and over and over again!

It’s baffling how this game was greenlit.

Now, I understand there was some sort of studio pressure and internal development problems throughout the entirety of the game’s development, but that doesn’t excuse how bad this pile of garbage truly is.

I’m sorry, but the developers and hierarchy of Daedalic Entertainment should really have their jobs on the line for not only producing a game of this low quality and set the price at $70, but also have the requirements of this game be out of this world ridiculous.

Seriously, this game recommends your PC specs to have an Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16 GB RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, 8GB (with DLSS Quality Setting) / AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT, 12GB GPU, a DX Version 12, Windows 10/11, 64-bit, 45 GB of storage, and screen resolution at Medium preset and 1080p, Ray Tracing on. This is INSANE!

I couldn’t recommend this game less even if I had a gun pointed to my head by the developers, so it should come as no surprise Lord of the Rings: Gollum gets the incredibly rare -1/10 score from me.

It’s even worse than what the score says, but that’s as far as my scales go.

PS: Oh, and before I forget, this game got even the most fundamental lore about the titular character wrong: they called him Smeagol BEFORE Frodo called him that. The whole reason Gollum becomes so friendly and sympathetic with Frodo is because Frodo actually treated him like a former Hobbit and called him by his original name (which he hadn’t heard in centuries prior to their encounter).

Images Source: Featured Image: (Image Source: Sony/Image Creator: Daedalic Entertainment) (The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – Story Trailer | PS5 & PS4 Games – YouTube)

In Text Image 1: (Image Source: Sony/Image Creator: Daedalic Entertainment) (The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – Story Trailer | PS5 & PS4 Games – YouTube)

In Text Image 2: (Image Source: Sony/Image Creator: Daedalic Entertainment) (The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – Story Trailer | PS5 & PS4 Games – YouTube)