The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Launches to Crushing Reviews

Update - first reviews

The first reviews of the game have begun to appear online, and they are downright horrible. OnOpenCritic the average rating is just 38%.

Below are sample ratings:

1. TechRaptor - 6.5/10
2. Nexus Hub - 6.5/10
3. Shacknews - 6/10
4. Gamer Escape - 4/10
5. PCGamesN - 3/10
6. We Got This Covered - 2/5
7. Twinfinite - 1.5/5
8. Press Start - 3/10
9. GameSpot - 2/10
10. PushSquare - 2/10

Reviewers mainly criticize the boring and very repetitive gameplay, the poor storyline and the fact that the game fails to use the license of The Lord of the Rings to make the game more attractive.

As the reviewer for GameSpot put it:

Original news

Today debuts The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, an action adventure game that will emphasize stealth. In it we will play as the title character known from Tolkien's novels.

1. The game will be released today on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
2. A Nintendo Switch edition is also planned, but it will be released at a later date.
3. The PC version will be sold on Steam and Epic Games Store.
4. The game is also available onPlayStation Store and Microsoft Store, costing $59.99 for the standard edition.
5. In addition to the standard version, a so-called Precious Edition will be available for $69.99, which will additionally offer: the Sindarin VO DLC, adding authenticity to the elven dialogues, DLC with a compendium of information about the game's world, a soundtrack and an Art Exhibition app showing behind-the-scenes work on the game.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum promises to be this week's biggest release, although it remains somewhat of an enigma. The video footage from the game looks intriguing in terms of gameplay (and less promising in terms of graphics), but in practice it's hard to judge whether it will turn out to be good or bad. What is known, however, is that both its eventual success and failure will be talked about.

1. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum on Steam

Finally, it is worth quoting the system requirements of the PC version.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum - minimum requirements for PC

1. Processor: Intel Core i5-4690 / AMD Ryzen 3 1300x
2. Graphics card: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB.
3. DirectX version: 12
4. RAM: 8GB
5. Disk space: 45 GB
6. Operating System: Windows 10/11 64-bit

This configuration is expected to be sufficient for comfortable play on the lowest settings at 1080p resolution and without ray tracing.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum - recommended requirements for PC

1. Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
2. Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 8GB (with DLSS Quality enabled) / AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT 12GB.
3. DirectX version: 12
4. RAM: 16GB
5. Disk space: 45 GB
6. Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit

The above configuration is expected to be sufficient for comfortable play on medium settings at 1080p resolution and with ray tracing enabled.

Confusion with requirements

There was a lot of confusion with the game's system requirements. They were first revealed in April and turned out to be shockingly high, especially considering what visual level the game presents. Then in May, the developers published new specs twice.

The final version seen above no longer scares so much, but it is worth noting that the recommended hardware will enable us to play only on medium settings. For high you will most likely need a much more powerful PC (earlier requirements spoke of 32 GB of RAM and GeForce RTX 3080/4070 cards).