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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