The Lord of the Rings: Gollum review – boil it, mash it, stick it in the bin

PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC (version tested); Daedalic Entertainment/Nacon
A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien’s fiction

This game never looked especially promising, and now it’s out, it’s about as riveting as listening to a huddle of ents discuss the finer points of deciduous shedding. It’s a technical disaster, at least on PC, and even when it does work, it feels like an extended forced stealth section from a game where stealth is just one of 50,000 other systems. It’s watery, janky, broken, alternately frustrating and frictionless, completely without tension or pathos, and squanders a great concept.

We are placed in the shoes – well, in the pallid, bare feet – of Gollum AKA Sméagol, the pre-pandemic blueprint for the trash goblin that now lives inside us all. At various points during the (too frequent, mostly boring, school play-tier) dialogue, you’ll be able to choose how he acts, in ways replete with such delicate moral nuance as “crush the harmless insect” or “don’t”, and so guide the creature down one path or another. I’m all for ambient dialogue in games, but here you are prevented from interacting with anything while a conversation is playing, which is a lot of the time.

Lord of the Rings: Gollum is out 25 May; £42.99