The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Review (Grimnir)
I didn’t feel like Gollum, you ruined my precious and think the game overall missed the story and immersion. I didn't play till the end and honestly I was bored even in the first stages of the game. I think the trailer is a bit misleading but will play more to see how it goes. I can revisit a couple of updates later though. I wouldn’t recommend it but it is not because it is a bad game, there are much worse games in the market. I think I didn’t like it because the fantasy felt so off.
Gameplay wise, if you are looking to be Gollum and have a deep connection with LOTR, this game can break your mood. It feels a bit parkour, a bit farm ville and wow quests to pick up flowers in the Elwyn Forest!
Performance wise I didn’t have any problems, I have Raider GE77HX 12UHS with a i9 processor so it wasn’t even an exercise for the laptop. Can not say something bad performance wise.
Art wise is not ok and I think it is super bad with immersion! I mean A LOT! Shader and rendering problems are immense still it was recovering the bugs through the game so it wasn’t game breaking. I didn’t understand the mindset art wise. It could be more stylized and feel much better. They tried to be semi realistic and it feels very off, lightning is even worse. The Gollum model really needed more attention. It is not even close to what is advertised in the screenshots.
Controls are okish, it is quite easy and feels not too clunky. There are obvious bugs especially with caves and first person cameras. Control in parkour is bad. I mean I don’t even feel like parkouring. You can just spam jump everywhere, I wanted to spam jump since it was boring. Balancing in edges is uncontrollable. Level design is a bit working off with the controls, in ladder you have to E to speed up / slide not shift. Why is there a decision like that hard to know? Player movement is clunky and if you are a click spammer it feels like playing a werewolf.
UX interaction wise, the death loop is bad. Why are you asking for a dead player to confirm to spawn? Puzzle interactions are sometimes ok but generally especially in puzzles with environment and AI is no good, it is not thinked through. Interactable objects are buggy. Also think it should be ok to hide interactable icons while not active so that the player doesn’t wait for it to be activated at least. Map interaction is bad. Frail guy is so slow and walks like has no knees. Also there is a bug in that where the player's movement is limited, you can jump spam to get ahead of the story, sometimes it works so you don’t have to wait for him all the time, so it is a good bug.