He's clearly not a brawler, so he has to sneak and climb to survive. You play Gollum in a previously unrecorded story of his search for (what else?) the Precious during the first few chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring. While the mechanics of the game are by now familiar, this still promises to be a fresh take if you weren't enthused with the hack-and-slash of Monolith's Middle-earth games. A Switch version is due later in the year. Daedalic has revealed that its stealth action take on JRR Tolkien's fantasy world will be available May 25th on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. An interestingly flawed portrayal, especially the sullen and sassy Elven teenagers Gollum is placed under the watch of.After a particularly long incubation process, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is almost ready to ship. The Elves here are scruffy, lanky and condescending instead of willowy and ephemeral. Brighter and less murdery, but still tense, with a sense that either Gollum or the elves could snap at any moment. This is all the clearer in the latter half of the 10-12 hour campaign, which takes place in elven lands. Outside of Gollum’s design and character performance, the game isn’t particularly beholden to Peter Jackson’s movies. Less bulky, with vaguely insectoid, rounded metal armor with a patchwork of leather and chain holding it all together. The Orcs are visually distinct from other LOTR games. Also getting some love are the rival factions of humans in Sauron’s employ, with The Candle Man-a scheming sorcerer that uses Gollum as an informant and toady-stealing the show. Gollum gets to feed piranha-like larval Orcs a slurry of magically fortified gore until they grow into the pallid humanoids we know and love to stab. As well as mining, Gollum works in the Orc breeding pits, showing us how Sauron’s armies are farmed like belligerent sea-monkeys. The game uses this opportunity to explore the mechanics and politics of Mordor. While there’s not a huge amount of violence shown, there’s enough unsettling aftermath to give the imagination plenty to hang onto. This vision of Mordor is gruesomely detailed, full of ornately etched black steel, stretched and bloody hides and a lot of slick, fresh-flowing blood and black water. Mordor here is surprisingly grim, crueller than the cartoonish heavy metal aesthetics of Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War with its wacky orcs and sexy Shelob. Pit stopĪs well as mining, Gollum works in the Orc breeding pits, showing us how Sauron’s armies are farmed like belligerent sea-monkeys. Set after Bilbo steals Gollum’s ring, a little over the first half of the game tells the tale of Gollum’s survival in the slave pits beneath Mordor (he’s literally neurodivergent and a miner), and his long, improvised and often-flawed plan to escape. Thematically, the game is also bifurcated. I especially liked the tense scenes requiring me to pick a side and argue in their favor, reasoning the other half into submission. While it seldom changes much, there’s frequent Telltale-esque prompts where you can pick whether Gollum or Sméagol answers in dialogue. It dissects Gollum and why he remains an outsider despite any best efforts from himself or potential friends. As with Guardians, it’s set against some gorgeous backdrops, and while characters are often animated stiffly (especially in dialogue), the script held my attention well. Whenever it’s not being a sneaky platformer, Gollum impressed me as a work of interactive Tolkien fanfic, not unlike 2021’s Guardians Of The Galaxy in its walk-and-talk formula punctuated by action. Thankfully, the narrative half carried Gollum for me. It works, but if this was all Gollum offers, I’d have probably given up. Control inputs are sometimes dropped, and while the stealth and platforming segments alike are generously checkpointed, you either follow the intended path or die. Gollum is far too filthy and emaciated to be a convincing Nathan Drake or Sam Fisher, and whether he successfully reaches for a ledge or plummets to his instant death sometimes feels random. If you’re not blessed with Frodo’s luck, you might be better off waiting for a few rounds of patches.īoth halves of the action side are functional but a bit undercooked. I was apparently very lucky, with other players reporting significantly nastier issues, including frequent crashes and progression-breaking bugs forcing rolling back to earlier saves or worse. While I encountered a great many little glitches when playing Gollum (this is an undeniably janky game), most were related to dropped inputs and Gollum refusing to grab onto ledges, leading to sudden deaths.
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