The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™

Tolkien used Gollum masterfully in the entire LotR saga. A bit player NPC whose character served to illustrate the damning effects of greed, avarice, and covetousness, and their proclivity to warp a human being to such an extent that he becomes physically deformed to the point of being unrecognizable, Gollum nonetheless was never created as a central character meant to carry an entire story-line by himself. Tolkien told Gollum's tragic story in the books in a gradual arc that served to highlight the power of evil to warp people in various, very intensive ways, and to ultimately destroy them. It was a magnificent and skillful morality play, woven so well into the LotR fabric, but as this game reveals, Gollum was never meant to be a central protagonist around which a deep plot and story flows. I thought the developers didn't seem to know quite what to do with Gollum, precisely...;) As well as the obvious problems with using the Unreal engine, as described well by fil-cat. Another problem is that we already know when and how Gollum ends up! No mystery there, of course. I suppose such a story could succeed, at least theoretically, but it would take a lot of work--basically an entire reworking of the game.

I may not have the best hardware but I can run games that are way more demanding and look far more impressive then this game and run at max settings at over 60fps and yet this game I'm lucky if I'm getting 30fps most of the time and the cutscenes stutter like I'm trying to run it on integrated graphics. I haven't gotten that far in the game and the inconstant frame rate to the point where it regularly freezes during simple cutscenes has made this game impossible to play for me at this time. I'll try it again once an update is pushed to hopefully fix these major issues but until then I might as well just uninstall it. As for the game itself it's ok to me so far if a bit all over the place with some dated gameplay mechanics and...a lot of hand holding and other reviews I've seen show me that I should not expect it to get much better but I seem to find entertainment in games that others say are complete trash so who knows. I decided to preorder the Precious Edition because FOMO got the better of me but had I known how bad it was going to be I would have waited for a sale or at least to see if the developer would update the game to fix the issues that a basic play test would have revealed. I really don't like it when games release in such a state all because they can "patch it later" because a lot of games never really get patched but are happy to take our money anyway while giving us garbage in return and right now this game is little more then garbage in it's current state. There are worse games out there sure but I really didn't want to think this game would end up being one of them.

There are clearly some disillusioned clowns at work here. £42.00 for THIS utter turkey? Gimme a break. Who in their right mind would pay such a sum for this trash? A game that even the developers have admitted it was a car crash resulting in them cancelling further games and completely shutting down their own developer studio. My advice, ignore this drivel, people and go get a real masterpiece like Baldur's Gate III for just six quid more!

How did this game go through the entire development process with so many people looking at it and pass through like this? Even the character model for gollum is a joke, I can't stop laughing every time I see it.