We tried to review The Lord of the Rings: Gollum on PS5, but an uncharacteristically poor prerelease state made that task impossible.
We had planned to post a review for the PlayStation 5 version of Daedalic Entertainment and Nacon’s The Lord of the Rings: Gollum today, but we can’t do that in good faith at this moment. Simply put, the PS5 version we tested was too broken to fairly critique.
After downloading the PS5 code we received from a PR representative for Nacon, we booted up the game, interested to see Daedelic’s interpretations of Gollum’s tragic story. We could load up the game just fine and watch the game’s intro, but within five minutes of playing, the game crashed. That certainly struck us as odd, but prelaunch builds of games do crash sometimes. We chalked it up to a normal incident, restarted the game, and kept on playing.
Then it happened again. And again. And again.
During our first two hours with The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, the PS5 version of the game crashed 11 times. On top of that, we experienced many other bugs, like objectives not triggering, losing the ability to move, and Gollum getting stuck in the floor for a second upon respawning. It quickly became apparent that it would be difficult to critique this game properly. So this is not a proper review of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Instead, we want to paint a clear picture of what shape the game was in less than 24 hours ago, as well as provide a sense of how many of those issues you can expect after its day one patch.Why we didn’t review The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
In the little time we did end up spending with The Lord of the Rings: Gollum prelaunch, we did see the basics of the game’s story, platforming, stealth, choice system, and puzzles. We found all of those elements initially intriguing, if a bit antiquated. However, our experience was much too unstable to get a true feel for how this game will play post-release. After the 11th crash, we deemed that the technical state of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum on PS5 was too dire for us to keep playing for review.
So, why not just stop there and give Gollum a zero-star or half-a-star review? Well, that’s not fair to the game, either. These technical issues were so overbearing that it felt impossible to critically assess The Lord of the Rings: Gollum as a gaming experience in a legitimate way. It’s Digital Trends’ belief that if a game is outright broken like this, it’s not yet worthy of a review in a traditional sense. When Digital Trends’ gaming team gives a low score, it’s because of something more intrinsic to the game’s design or execution of its idea.
