Gollum is one of the first games I’ve ever played where the loading screen hint and story text was vastly more interesting than all the story and gameplay you see inside of the actual title naming for Stealth gameplay experience Golem is headed to pretty much everything but the switch and feels
Like an unfettered attempt to squeeze dry the last vestiges of emotional energy from a fan base that already looks like Bilbo that one second he tried to get the ring back from Gandalf when I do reviews I buy a copy of every game so I spend my money so you don’t
Have to for me to continue doing that without the ads or sponsored crap it helps if you subscribe or thumbs up or join Patron enough of that though let’s get to this precious piece of gaming history also patches are planned for the release and a couple came in while this
Review was actually being done to test those out Gollum opens up to a back and forth story between a Sprite Gandalf and a down on his leg Gollum who looks like he’s made of scoliosis an adult pattern hair loss and this is his younger version the story has Gandalf
Interrogating Gollum about what has happened recently all this occurring before the Lord of the Rings with Gollum quickly breaking under the wise wizard stunning use of a strategy that could simply be called ask again louder then it’s a series of flashbacks and forwards as it tells the story Gollum hiding from
The eye of Sauron learning the ins and outs of the movement and item use system and then getting into trouble the game has you running and climbing crawling and sneaking and occasionally using items in the game world to distract different characters like Orcs And occasionally squeeze by him or sometimes
Murder throttle one that isn’t wearing his helmet the biggest issue with Gollum is for a game about travel based on a story of one of the largest and longest Adventures for Heroes it goes nowhere and does almost nothing with its setup do you know what’s not fun when after a
Couple minutes of an opening you spend the next 30 minutes stuck with Gollum in an orc prison collecting people’s dead ID tags I’m not joking it’s that basic structure that is continually seen and used here but let’s look at a couple comparisons take for instance the easy
Enough comparison to a game there are many ways mimics the feel and desire of Gollum and that sticks those sticks is more action oriented Styx has a complexity though to the levels to motivate players to utilize the skills that they have in a free-form manner after the initial presentation and
Demonstration of those skills but Gollum almost never does this the one way is the only way it traps you in a one-way puzzle-solving prison crushing almost all of your freedom yet where other titles in particular are walking simulators do some of the same things they try to offer a captivating story
That’s continually doled out with successful completion of locations but Gollum doesn’t really have any clue where it wants to do that with cutscenes that just pop in or up or characters that look special so when you go up to talk to them you’re like okay here we go
Here’s some cool story here’s some character to let me dive a bit deeper into the Lord of the Rings fiction then the character asks you for water that you can’t get water that they were bitching about prior to you walking up to them basically repeating a lot of the
Same information time and again Gollum effectively turns into a cutscene data and information dump of information you already had it has a desire to tell you data again and again like a YouTube video stretched to say 20 minutes that should have been 10. without any attempt
To further the story or even the one activity that you might be doing at the time gollum’s looking for a puzzle path kind of gameplay experience but not branching out into one does hurt the title meaning that every location is this predetermined color-coded ledge like Gandalf trundled along before you
Got there with a yellow highlighter and marked everywhere you could or could not go I guess if Gollum has one thing going for it it’s that this little booger can scoot arms and legs straight up flailing around as he just Jets across levels he’s got four getaway sticks instead of
Two and a speed across a grounder climbing shows that every time but you’re consistently shoved into situations that are so lackluster in their imagery and gameplay mechanics use that you have to assume Gandalf’s interrogation is just a giant scheme to make Gollum a better Storyteller later
On now Golem and smeagle can argue and this is one of the gameplay bits that the developer has shown prior you can choose many times who to answer as and who to answer against and fleshes out that story when you do so arguing over points you have to convince Smeagol or
Gollum like Ace Attorney the homeless Edition with him bantering back and forth before usually easily convincing the other side that it’s best to just agree every choice is a bad one and move on much like I did with this game Golem’s level production is also charitably going to be remembered as all
Over the [ __ ] place sometimes a character’s lips move during cutscenes other times they don’t sometimes they move a little bit and then stop in the middle and sometimes both characters don’t face each other as they continue to talk making all the characters look like they’re a full generation ago in
Their presentation the game stuttered during those presentations doesn’t help either with cut scenes drawn in details and popping in the geometry right in front of you consistently now Gollum doesn’t do itself any favors either for example animations here in the game other than Gollum himself are very bare
And with all sorts of problems like when you’re crawling through tunnels you can’t even turn or look around you just push forward so that Golem moves forward or backward to move backward this wouldn’t be an issue if it bear early happened which isn’t true this is all
Stymied by a ton of collision problems with Gollum himself especially on locations you need to crawl through you might have a mission where you have to crawl through a hole and go along two long caverns and nothing else and then you put a rock on a barrel only to have
To turn around and go through two long caverns and two holes after it explodes but instead you end up getting caught on the edge and dying only to have it start at the checkpoint again and actually sorry I thought I had some comparison there but frankly I do not remember a
Game doing something that poorly in a long time characters are also horribly textured when it comes to presentation their hair like baby doll hair stolen from the hair replacement techniques like 20 years ago and haphazardly glued onto everybody’s face and this isn’t just Gollum or their beard suddenly gets
A hair erection and points straight out of their face like someone with a dowsing stick had it set to the quickest way to exit the game button here’s what I thought Gollum would do though I thought it would present us with at least a graphically passable and unique
Angle in a character loved by the books and movies here’s what Gollum does everything but that and it doesn’t help that Gollum who’s probably the best looking character the entire title still looks like someone roughly sketched the teen emo version of Gollum during a break and then everybody was like yeah
Sounds good artistic license with major IPS or genres is a fascinating way to bring in more fans sometimes sell shaded Productions have brought in more Gamers into Shooters like Borderlands other times games like Gollum make you wonder what happened performance here is also a hugely mixed bag and currently
Especially in Exploration locations you can see stutters and FPS drops everywhere this is especially noticeable when the game decides that you probably don’t know what you need to do so it has a long camera shoot moving through the entire level from start to finish to
Show you how to get from point to point and it looks like a damned GoPro losing signal with the 1080 TI settings had to be dumped super low to get it playable at 1080P and with frame generation on with a 4090 stutter still came up many
Of them most likely also caused by the game’s choice of using the Unreal Engine but it is not a smooth title luck likely something that is more smooth are some of the audio sections the soundtrack in particular evokes feelings from the movies and has some incredibly tense tracks during stealth sections with this
Awesome deep drop tone that rises up when you’re exploring it’s actually so noticeable it sometimes made me think something was going wrong with the audio section just for a second or my setup it’s disturbing it’s creepy absolutely an excellent idea though and other tracks are very orchestral fair with a
Good deal of somber sections from stringed instruments that really feel at home right in the desolation of Middle Earth and with the movies one particular awesome bit of note is that in places where the audio is impacted by the location with music coming in echoey or
Full of Menace I love that now voices honestly the change of gollum’s voice actor is noticeable but it’s not as bad of a representation as I think some people will assume it is Andy’s award-winning performance so well known that anyone taking this place is bound to be considered less proficient is
Missed we’ve seen situations like this though for example guardians of the Galaxy and while many like the movies better I found that that game’s replication of the Wayward Galactic team was an incredible interpretation in its own right honestly with all the other issues in Gollum this was less of a
Problem than I expected other voices are hit and miss with many Orcs sounding like dudes who work down at the Long Shore docks or people suffering from a super long version of laryngitis other characters like Gandalf and some others that you meet later on I can say they’re
Not that bad I do see die hards hating this versions of voices though and then that brings us to the sound and this is so important for games especially a game based on stealth the sounding Golem is woefully uneven with some places getting this Focus you would expect on a game
Like this especially crawling through caves that open up on one side with a massive Ravine and that audio stretches out on that side like an audible warning of the death that you’re gonna face if you fall in moving around some of the locations later has this excellent sourcing for environmental audio as well
Making fortresses and prison cells sound as accurate as well probably anyone wants to know about other locations sound direction is fantastically lean with few indications that enemies around you or above you or beside you or exactly where you are and what is going on in the location that you’re in and
When attention is paid it’s actually not bad though I would point out that some samples for moving around in water and in areas of stone and those kind of surroundings they’re a little bit raspy something that I can see a lot of people being particularly bothered by over long
Times of play this all brings us to fun factor is there any fun in the game no not a lot Gollum just really isn’t that enjoyable it could have been a character study in the skin of our favorite gray-skinned freak but instead it’s a catastrophically simple movement puzzle game with occasional times where
Gollum and smeagle argue with each other over who gets to hit who in the head with a rarely used Rock whatever is there when it includes the stealth would it include strangling enemies or if it includes just looking around the game world or talking to Gandalf it’s just
Not that enjoyable when you see day one and then day two come up as cut scenes you get that feeling that you have when you watch someone in your friend group make that horrible social mistake and everybody knows it’s going to be years before that dude is remembered as
Anybody but that one guy the problem with this game is it probably won’t be remembered much at all it’s not an interesting tale gollum’s a tragic story of emotions and personality traits magnified he’s basically the world’s first narrative influencer all the bad and nasty magnified to a point where he
Couldn’t do much else than just argue with himself and lose Golem doesn’t help itself though that the gameplay even after the first 30 minutes starts to fall almost instantly apart as you guys know I rate games on a buy weight for a sale or deep deep sale or never touch
Rating system Gollum needed a great deal more time as emaciated and scatterbrained as that Title Character it shines at times then it Dives down to the darkest depths and for anyone but the most die-hard fan of Lord of the Rings who needs a game case to sit beside their Gandalf wooden Cod piece
This is going to be a wait for a deep deep sail nothing about the game looks like it was a lack of skill or care maybe a little bit here and there it looks though like a lack of time and release schedule and sadly patches of the technical issues are not going to
Fix the majority of the problems I had with Gollum so anyway I hope you guys like these reviews as you guys know I buy a copy of every game I get so if you get a chance check out the patreon I would love for you to thumbs this up or
Subscribe and if you get a chance go out there find a game that you like and tell other people about it because there’s enough bad news for everybody peace out and enjoy the rest of your week a room night precious You are looking for him weren’t you You left your home in the mountains worming your way down the hills always hiding from the Moon