Lord of the Rings: Gollum almost feels like a fraud

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe has always been one of the most popular works of fantasy, but its popularity sky-rocketed with the release of Peter Jackson's film trilogy in the early 2000's. After that, the franchise really became a humongously popular multi-billion-dollar property.

Since the original trilogy several triple-A quality video games based on the LotR universe have been released to very good reception and accolades. The quality and popularity of the original trilogy and the subsequent well-received and acclaimed video games have kind of set the expectations of the entire franchise quite high. Given how absolutely profitable and valuable the franchise is, one would expect that the property owners wouldn't allow sub-par products to be created using their intellectual property.

Thus, when recently a new game in the franchise was announced, expectations were quite high. This especially since the game was not just about some random unknown characters invented for the game itself (like the Shadow of Mordor franchise), but about one of the most famous characters of the story: Gollum.

Couple this with the fact that the game is being currently sold at full triple-A price (ie. US$70, or your local equivalent), this really gives the expectation of a triple-A quality game.

Turns out, all of this is highly, highly misleading.

For starters, the game has been developed by a relatively small indie game studio, most known for their low-budget point&click games. (It's rather incomprehensible to me how such a small studio got rights to this. One would think that the property owners wouldn't sell rights to any part of the franchise unless it's for a quite hefty sum of money. How did this small indie game studio afford this? Or were the property owners just being magnanimous, naive, or outright stupid?)

Of course a big game being developed by a small indie game studio is not in itself a guarantee that it will be a horrendous game. There have been some examples of exactly this happening, and the game actually turning out quite good. However, this is quite a rarity, and by default such a huge title being developed by a small indie game studio should be a red flag.

And, as it turns out, the red flags are completely warranted.

Not only is the game technically absolutely horrendous (with constant graphical glitches, animation glitches, absolutely sub-par facial animations, horrible character model design, etc), and not only is the gameplay very sub-par, but it's also extraordinarily sub-par and disappointing in its content and story.

The game is supposed to show Gollum's escape from captivity, when he was captured by Sauron's forces and tortured in order to discover the location of the One Ring. Thus, one would think that the game would be exactly that: Some kind of stealth game where you try to escape from Mordor, avoiding (and sometimes perhaps stealthily killing) orcs and so on and so forth. Perhaps we get some more insight into Gollum's character, possibly his past. Gollum ought to be a sort of complex anti-hero (he is effectively a villain, but mostly because he has been corrupted by having had the One Ring for hundreds of years, and because of his extremely deep addiction to it, ie. he is essentially a junkie who can't help himself, and who can't think of anything else than getting the ring back, and he originally didn't use to be evil before he got the ring.)

What do we get instead? For at least half the game you are commanded by the prison guards to run errands and do menial tasks (most of them using horrendous and boring game mechanics), you make friends with other prisoners (which goes completely against Gollum's characterization in the books and movies), and you even hatch and get a bird companion (which most definitely goes against Gollum's characterization. He eats birds, he doesn't befriend them.)

And even all these errands and fetch quests are extremely boring, oftentimes unintuitive (quite often you are given no hints about what to do next, and it's in no way obvious), and it's just horrendous.

And as for the story? Mostly it deals with some drama between the prison guards, nothing to do with Gollum himself.

And all the bad character model designs, glitches and horrendous facial animations don't exactly help.

Given the high expectations put on such a game, and especially given the full triple-A price of the game, this almost feels like fraud. It might not technically and legally speaking be fraud, but it just feels like it. Everything about the context in which the game has been published speaks of high quality and high expectations, yet what we get is absolutely sub-par and horrendous. And if you make the mistake of purchasing the game for full price, you just threw away your money in the trashcan with no way of getting it back. (In Steam you can get it back if you have played the game for less than 2 hours, but that's it. You would need to realize how bad the game is, and that it will not get any better, within that 2 hours, or else you have lost your money. In all the other platforms there is no such feature: If you bought the game, you lost your money, period. No takesie-backsies, sorry.)

You can watch a good review of this for example here.