There’s no cat-and-mouse game of outsmarting enemies using interesting abilities and clever level design as you do in something like Dishonored or Hitman, you just exploit their painfully obvious blind spots with no objective outside of reaching the designated point.

These are issues that plagued mediocre stealth games 15 years ago, and it’s jarring to see them in 2023. Enemies have extremely limited parol patterns, are terribly nearsighted, and seem to suffer from acute, rapid-onset amnesia, forgetting Gollum ever existed not long after losing sight of him.

Any time Gollum needs to go from point A to B undetected, it’s going to be a slog. Rather than a throwback, it comes across as outdated a poor facsimile of classics like the Prince of Persia series.įinally there are the stealth segments, which are simply bad. The paths are rigidly defined, and often involve blind jumps or best guesses at what the next intended handle is. Having experienced a modern Assassin's Creed or Tomb Raider game, here it feels far too easy to jump toward the correct point and fall to your death because you drifted to one side, or missed the part of the ledge that has the white line that establishes exactly where you can grab. Spacious rooms with handles to climb, walls to run, and leaps to take bring a faster pace of action, but the loose and floaty way Gollum moves and imprecise controls make it feel like something from the PlayStation 2 era.

The platforming phases are more compelling, but still poorly designed. Trying to get anywhere involves too little speed, too much waiting, and an unfortunate amount of hearing Gollum choking on his own breath. It could be fun to run around with Gollum, thanks to his surprising sprint speed, but he has a stamina meter that depletes in just a few seconds and takes far longer to replenish. It never feels like there’s any point to it, just busywork. There’s always some conceptually different scenario, like crawling through small openings to detonate explosives, but functionally it’s a series of marches across the same areas over and over again. There’s the chores phase, in which Gollum goes from one waypoint to another to complete some menial task. There are generally three phases to any level, and they range from uninteresting to just plain bad.

The lord of the rings gollum gameplay