There’s nothing “precious” about this game
Nacon is trying to step up their game and be known not just as a controller and accessories manufacturer, but also a serious publisher. Their biggest title, based on The Lord of the Rings franchise, just hit the market, and just as its main character, Gollum, suffers from an astounding number of issues. Somewhere under the hood there is a game, but you might not have the patience to find it.
The concept of Gollum is intriguing and worthy of attention, as it brings us the story of the most wretched creature created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Gollum. The developer itself, Daedalic Entertainment, also has quite a “clean” track record, being especially popular among adventure game fans, but also developing different types of games, like Styx or Barotrauma. So how did things end up so bad?
The answer is probably worth a lengthy study and a whitepaper for the ages about how to squander a valuable license and release an unplayable game. In all fairness, we have to mention this from the start: in its current form, after the Day1 patch, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is an unplayable mess. It crashes randomly anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 minutes; it fails to transition correctly after cutscenes, often dropping the character in a mess of polygons.
On top of that, the game suffers from many other technical errors that make it impossible to play. Not even a die-hard fan equipped with the patience of Aragorn will be enticed to tackle the game. What’s even more painful considering that the game crashes very often is that Gollum doesn’t allow you to save manually.
Just like many other similar games, Gollum uses a checkpoint system, so often times you’ll have to play the same segment over and over again because your game crashed.
