If you read the preview I made on The Lord of the Rings Gollum, you probably already know I don't know much about the Lord of the Rings mythos. While the game managed to spark a bit of interest in that regard, it still left a few doubts in my mind regarding its replay value. The project certainly looked ambitious, but it felt like something was missing. That feeling continued to permeate when I began to review this game.
Unfortunately, I don't think the ambition has managed to pay off in this instance. While the game does do a lot of things right, it is offset by several issues both technical and gameplay-wise. The game definitely feels like it wants to be more than it actually is at times, and it can work against it in many areas.
Unlike many of my other articles where I sing the game's praises before heading into my issues, I'll start with the problems I have with the game this time since The Lord of the Rings Gollum's issues stem mostly from its presentation. The Lord of the Rings Gollum is a game in which the character talks about his time as a slave living below The Dark Tower. Every cutscene and dialogue is fully rendered in 3D with a presentation that leaves me quite mixed a lot of times.
See, the thing about this game is that it has some lofty system requirements for its PC version. Despite meeting those requirements with my 3070/13th Gen Intel Processor, I found myself stuttering quite a lot and losing control of the character. More often than not, it was that very thing that caused the game to miss some of my inputs and cause me to run off a cliff. During my preview, I thought that some of these issues came from the fact I was playing a cloud demo, but it seems like they somehow stuck to the final release as well.
What's more, the game struggles to run at a proper framerate even without Ray Tracing being on. When it runs smoothly, it does reach a delicious 120FPS. But when it stutters or has its moments of jank, the game has managed to dip to framerates below 60. Not helping things is the fact that cutscenes are pre-rendered to run at 30FPS, making some of the experience feel like a total whiplash when you go from a buttery smooth performance to a cutscene that reduces the framerate to 1/4 of the original framerate.
What's more frustrating is that back in the preview days, I was told that the majority of the graphical issues within the game would be fixed by the developers themselves. But, as you can see from the screenshot above, the game will not hesitate to have some lighting problems, huge draw distance issues with DLSS enabled (even with the Quality preset), and the aforementioned stutters. This experience manages to throw me out of whatever immersion I feel in the plot.
I praised the parkour system during the preview. However, now that I've had time to test the game at my own pace, I began to notice just how limited it actually is. Gollum is pretty accident-prone and he will often manage to somehow die from such a low height that even Donkey Kong's main character (which the Mario movie retconned as its own separate character, Jumpman) would feel ashamed.
It doesn't help that Gollum, more often than not, loses at everything he goes up against. The game encourages stealth and/or addressing situations in myriad ways. While that's what it looks like on paper, you soon realize that it's less that and more so choosing between going through the left path around the enemies or the right path around the enemies. If you decide to be bold and run through guards and be more reckless, you will soon be caught by the biggest grab hitboxes I've ever seen or killed by arrows that can go straight through walls.
At times, even the morality system present in The Lord of the Rings Gollum feels like it couldn't reach its true potential. Perhaps it's because they wanted to ultimately stick to the lore of the franchise and retain authenticity, but even when you let one side take dominance over the other, the events of the game and its characters remain largely unchanged save for a few spoken lines of dialogue in the quieter moments.
It's a shame, really, because there's clearly a lot of love put into this game. The environments are gorgeous to look at. Certainly not demanding enough to require an RTX 3080, but they can be eye-catching at points. The voice performances by every character were also on-point, with the stellar Gollum feeling almost one-to-one accurate to the character you see in the movies. The way the story is told is also fantastic, managing to keep me enthralled every second, making me wonder what would happen next despite the outcome of things already being set in stone.
I begin to see why the Lord of the Rings fans are so fascinated with this little goblin. He does have a very complex personality that manifests throughout cutscenes and dialogue. This game takes place before the events of the movies, so you can use this as a good starting point for your journey should you play the game without any knowledge of the franchise's lore.
Still, all of this doesn't help how The Lord of the Rings Gollum has managed to carry itself. The game's ambition is noticeable in many aspects but the way the game itself works is kind of wishing it was made by a more prominent developer. Don't get me wrong, Daedalic Entertainment has made a game that's still charming and recommendable in its own way. It's just that it needed a lot more polish before it was pushed out to the market.
If you're a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings mythos, I recommend giving this game a shot. You will have a great experience learning even more about the most emblematic creature in the history of medieval fiction. If you're new to the franchise and want to learn more about what made this series so beloved, I also think you will be thoroughly satisfied with the game's writing and such.
However, if you're the kind of player who wishes to see stunning visuals and deep mechanics alongside high replay value and stable performance, I believe that this experience will leave much to be desired. Because of this, I can only give it a cautious recommendation for those outside of the aforementioned niches.
Reviewed on PC (code provided by the publisher).
from Wccftech https://ift.tt/bsWGVQ4
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