This is an article from one of my friends. She gave me permission to repost this.
There’s Precious Little to be Excited About on the launch day of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
Watching the reviews and footage for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is highly concerning and honestly, to me personally quite upsetting!
I pre-ordered the game at my favorite game store because I’m a total LOTR nut who’s been waiting for a new game for years now. I’m highly concerned that at this point I paid almost $80 for a $20 experience that has no Tolkien soul in it despite giving a totally different impression to the press.
Look, pre-orders are a risky thing. I recognize that. It can be hard to check if a game is a quality experience before launch. This Gollum game is different! This is worse than any of the ill fated pre orders I’ve managed to make.
Little Dragons Cafe
This one hurts more than all of them. This feels personal. That’s probably because of my deep emotional connection to LOTR. I’ve been obsessed for literally twenty years. I care about Tolkien’s world more than any other other fantasy world. I want good things to come from what he created. I think the folks who made this game are here to capitalize on folks like me by being cheap, shallow, and lazy.
I’ve pre-ordered games I knew wouldn’t be great like My Little Pony and Neptunia RPG, I do have somewhat eclectic tastes in games. The difference with those is they weren’t AAA titles and I had low expectations going in and was just ready for anything. Those were franchises I like, but also knew don’t get a lot of budget and focused development, so they tend to have problems. They are what they are and don’t try to pretend and I’m cool with that.
With LOTR: Gollum, Alot of the pre launch footage it turns out was just the computer and is not in the game at all, or in such cases where the footage is gameplay, it’s been heavily edited to give the impression of better frame rate, speedier world traversal, and generally faster gameplay. That’s dishonest.
This game hits different. I had medium to high expectations for Gollum. I expected something fun and a little weird and different. Things looked pretty good in the back half of the pre launch phase. Yes, it was delayed, but so were God of War: Ragnarok, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Those turned out to be amazing! So, it did look rough early on, but It was delayed and I thought that was good. More time in the oven if you will.
That said I’ve watched several reviews this evening with footage. I also watched a few twitch streams and I’m horrified. It looks awful, plays awful, and has bugs for days!
I’m not home yet, the disk is in my PS5 (so it could install updates). I will play it Saturday evening and see if what I’ve seen is just not the full picture of the game, but I did watch about two hours worth of content.
I wanted something better, but it seems that I have paid top tier game prices for something that at best is average and at worst is better as a coaster. Really wish GameStop had that 48hr “guarantee to love it ” policy they had like a decade ago or something cuz from what I’ve seen tonight, to my great display and sadness, I’m not going to Love it.
Hope you enjoyed my morphine induced midnight ranting. I’ll try Gollum Saturday and pray everything is wrong, but until then remember….
“I have found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.”~ Gandalf
