The greatest achievement inThe Lord of the Rings: Gollumis Gollum himself.
He’s a beautifully realised thing.
His stance is a nervous, weight-shifting crouch.
His run is a giddy, loping scamper.
His movements seem shaped by his own poor experience of the world, forever flinching from expected blows.
The large wet eyes shift constantly, looking for an opportunity, any opportunity.
The mouth is a pinched snarl.
This is not a dig - it’s exactly how Gollum should look.
Other characters don’t argue with themselves bitterly over what to do.
Other characters don’t kill people on their birthdays.
Other characters don’t seem as strangely modern as Gollum, either.
Now he has his own game, a stealth and action adventure with a lot of platforming.
Gollum’s lost his precious, but he really wants it back.
Ever wonder what he got up to during this time?
Now you’re able to find out.
I think that’s a problem, to be honest.
Gollum was interesting when he met Bilbo, and interesting again when he started following Frodo.
What happened in between?
Do we need to know that?
Gollum the game doesn’t have any particularly brilliant answers, sadly.
Gollum starts in prison in Mordor and spends a long time trying to escape.
After that, I shouldn’t really spoil anything.
But I should also tell you that there’s nothing much worth spoiling.
How could there be?
We know how Gollum ends up, because it’s all there in The Lord of the Rings.
His interesting adventures were written down years ago, and have been turned into films.
It feels doomed from the start.
I should add: I don’t blame the developers for this.
Good storytelling is about knowing what you’ve got the option to skip.
Gollum clings to the stuff other writers have already cut.
Sadly, this is a well-intentioned botch, compromised by technology and - worse - by its controls.
Let’s take those points backwards.
Gollum is a game that mixes platforming and stealth.
The platforming at least benefits from some really lovely level design.
I love this stuff in principle, but sadly Gollum isn’t up to it.
The controls are sleepy but also wilful.
You’ll press a button and can’t be sure the input will register.
Or it might register and do something you didn’t entirely expect.
At times like this, I think of the early Tomb Raiders, which Gollum’s design sometimes invokes.
Gollum makes a muddle of this, however.
It fudges things too often and sometimes feels like it’s taking control when it shouldn’t.
Cue Nigel Pargetter death cry.
Special movements - the wall runs and those swing bars - are particularly bad for this stuff.
I didn’t know whether the game was going to cope with me.
Would it register my inputs or would it bring everything to a halt.
There are gauntlets here that are just ingenious in their complexity and the elegance of the layout.
But all too often the game’s controls can’t match the level design’s wit.
It’s painful to see such good intentions let down so regularly.
So many mission parts could have been an email.
But stealth is always where things most often crash to a halt.
What you get is stop-start progression made more palatable, thankfully, by decent auto-save points.
Stealth missions also feel like the game at its buggiest.
Caveat here: I played on PC, where the game was ramshackle but playable.
I’ve heard that the console versions are much more of a mess.
Or I reloaded to discover that I couldn’t move, but everything else could.
But it’s just a bit of a slog a bit too often.
Clever ideas will go on too long, or fall afoul of control problems and need constant restarts.
Early mission types: go down the mine, collect tags from dead bodies, head to the sewer.
Now a nice break to eat some worms.
It’s Gollum Stuff for sure, but it can get to you.
Gollum also has a vision mode that sometimes points the way ahead and highlights interactive objects and enemies.
Ultimately it got to me.
I left it there and I still can’t summon the energy to go back.
But it has too many problems, and only some of them can be sorted with patches.
