izigame.me

Original Review
I am honestly shocked at the absolute gall of Nacon to charge $50 for a game of such poor quality. This is an obviously amateur product across every dimension, riddled with so many technical and creative design flaws that the AAA-tier asking price beggars belief. The game looks, sounds, and handles like a student project demonstrating their first legitimate wrangling of Unreal Engine. Games of this calibre are typically free on Steam, which feels like the only appropriate price point for this product.
I'll update this review when I've finished, though I expect my regard for the game will only grow all the more scathing for each passing hour. I leave this thumbs-down in the meantime, in the hopes that it may help ward off prospective buyers.

Post-Completion Update
I guess I should at least list a few of the game's positive points, out of a bounty of good faith. The Gollum video game has some nice environment art, a few good pieces of music, and one Orc voice actor who really killed it with his lines.
Everything else about this game is, unfortunately, irredeemably bad. Awful character models, cumbersome camera movement, jerky animations, low-quality textures, totally borked occlusion silhouettes...from minute one, Gollum gives off a pretty rough vibe, very amateur, very unpolished. And that would be entirely fine, if the game didn't cost $50.
Everything about Gollum feels cheap, from its minimal storybook-style cutscenes, to the way that you ragdoll five feet into a fatal fall and just statically descend in a straight line while lying down as if you'd landed on an invisible floor, to the way that jumping over certain pieces of furniture results in your character awkwardly floating over them in a suspended falling animation. The game's text is rife with typos and grammatical errors, mixed tenses, and informal or contemporary language jarringly inserted into in-universe lore entries and recaps.
Facial animations are stiff and abruptly revert to neutral positions when a line of dialogue ends; plenty of character actions and game events have no accompanying SFX; the poorly implemented motion blur can't be disabled (unless they've since patched this); low draw distance, massive pop-in, constant frame hitches, the list of technical problems goes on and on and on.
You are presented with all of these problems before you even begin to play the game, a fresh nightmare unto itself. Gollum handles poorly in all regards: jumps will often careen out of control, there is minimal to no mid-air course correction, the pre-pathed climbing controls are abysmal, and even your default movement speed is pitifully slow. If you jump while climbing a ladder and nearing the top, Gollum will spring up wildly into the air in a directly vertical line, and then fall straight back down onto the ladder. It's difficult to articulate how completely bizarre this looks and feels in context.
This is a stealth game which places a single viable tool into your toolkit: throwing rocks to distract guards. It is a platformer in which your stamina bar runs out in about a second and a half, and returns at an excruciating rate. Certain paths for jumps seem to have been designated as the "correct" path, and the trajectory of any adjacent jump will crazily whiplash to adhere to them. This game's resolute eschewals of the design sensibilities dutifully accrued across three decades of industry exploration in 3D platforming are as ruinous as they are grimly hilarious.
I want to return for a moment to the game's technical woes, because they are both innumerable and worthy of contemplation.
- Around a third of the lines in the game had no accompanying lip-sync animations during my playthrough
- Objective markers jittered wildly when moved to the screen border
- Lighting effects often displayed fully through opaque barriers
- Some in-game cutscene camera angles qwre bugged, and entire scenes were blocked by a T-posing NPC or piece of the environment
- SFX or voice lines that were playing prior to a death often persisted through to my next spawn
- The faces on certain Elf NPCs were severely distorted during speech, with eyebrows and eyelids grotesquely pulling back inside the skull of the character
- Several dialogue trees incorrectly displayed the same prompt for every option on screen
- Multiple dialogue options enacted nothing when selected; Gollum simply stared blankly at the camera for 10-15 seconds, and then the scene continued
- During many parts of the game, skipping dialogue lines did not cut off the previous line - it simply continued to play overtop of the next line of dialogue. This effect could be compounded ad nauseam to experience true madness
- I encountered many cutscenes where the currently speaking NPC de-rendered, existing only as a disembodied voice
- Several platforms in the Riddlemaster's quarters don't seem to have been properly engineered. You're clearly supposed to jump off of these platforms to go higher, but only a very small subarea of each platform can be jumped from. The jump button does nothing when you are standing anywhere else on the platform
- I encountered several instances where my character became stuck inside the geometry of underwater obstacles, soft-locking me and forcing a restart
- On more than one occasion, NPCs got stuck bumping into each other on the way out of my prison cell, and became unable to proceed through the doorway. This also trapped me in the cell, forcing a restart
Do not think this scouring of the game's many failures will be limited to the technical side of things. The issues I've listed above, and even my more general complaints about the game's overall "cheap" feel, could theoretically be addressed by arduous post-launch support. But The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is rotten to its very bones, for many more reasons than I've enumerated above. Paywalled emotes in a single-player title are already enough to make my skin crawl, but locking a Sindarin voice pack behind Day 1 DLC strikes me as much worse - especially because, as I understand, this DLC barely adds more than a handful of lines. This is content that was finished at launch, and should have been included for the base price.
Still more issues gnaw at this corpse of a game. The first three chapters could have been an intro cutscene or text summary; you do nothing but rote chores, barely advancing any existing plotlines. Gollum also features an underbaked "companion" system during certain levels, and it is always to the player's detriment. A mid-game chase sequence with a large monster is implemented as a bottom-of-the-barrel quality Banjo Kazooie segment that goes on for way too long and features a maddeningly short music sample on loop - and then, after a short platforming section, you go through the exact same ordeal again.
Most of the marketing material for this game advertised it as an adventure that spans the breadth of Middle Earth, starring Gollum and a mysterious Elf companion. But the game is 10 chapters long, and you don't really leave Mordor until Chapter 7.
Gollum bears all the pockmarks of a project that was clearly developed under extreme duress, and I feel great sympathy for the dev team at Daedalic. Any ridicule they have been targeted with is severely misdirected.
Management and publishing, on the other hand, were out of their minds to release this game - and it's a shame, because I am given to understand that Daedalic has previously held a reasonably good reputation for their point-and-click adventure games. And now, as a result of this wild, reckless negligence, their development wing has been shut down entirely, and talented developers have lost their jobs.
I would end this review by saying "Gollum is a terrible video game," but that is inaccurate - because The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not a video game. It is a monument to the sins of man.