I was about three hours into the game, deep into the very long first real chapter when the game began to fall apart. I suspected the real cracks of the game were about to appear, but then the game soft-locked by putting me in a death loop. I took it back to the library after that.
I really hate to give up on the game because despite everything I still was curious to see where it would go. There are glimpses of real creativity underneath the over-dark levels and awkward animations. The writing is poor, but there I think there is weird, PS2 platformer story in there somewhere.

I get it. This is a mid-to-low-tier, bargain bin PS2 game released on the 9th generation of consoles with a severe lack of technological polish and about two decades too late to cash in on the craze of the Peter Jackson trilogy. All stuff that is deeply unacceptable in this day and age. Yet, between the budget-caliber Prince of Persia​ knockoff platforming and surprisingly compelling moral decision-making, I remained invested enough to see the journey through to one of its possible conclusions and even have some fun with it despite the bugs, occasional infuriatingly designed segments, and at times remarkably unfinished graphics.

The real star of the show, though? Undoubtedly developer Daedelic Entertainment's rendition of Middle-earth. It carries just the right mix of the mature, dark tone and look of the Jackson films paired alongside hints of the more fantastical, whimsical nature found in the Rankin/Bass animated adaptations. It did a better job of recapturing the magic of this world that I've missed for me than the live-action Hobbit movies. They also got the titular character himself very right. Really encapsulating what a sad, tragic, pitiful, and strangely sympathetic creature he is. The tale itself, outside of getting a little outlandish even for this fantasy universe in its final act, is a neat little prequel expansion on the protagonist’s history prior to the books. Choosing between which of his two warring split personalities to side with at critical junctures doesn't radically alter where the adventure ends by the time the credits roll due to canonical lore reasons, but still adds some cool little personalized wrinkles to the path up to that point regardless that I really enjoyed seeing.

Having said all that, it nonetheless remains hard to recommend that people look past its incredibly negative reception and try it out for themselves, as only an extremely small portion of players of whom I just so happen to be able to count myself among will be able to look past the significant number of aspects that don't work like they should or were intended to, and find the traces of good buried underneath. One takeaway everyone will receive however, is that we need more Lord of the Rings games. We need more that explore unique characters or corners of the novels, and feature different gameplay styles than that of your usual hack 'n' slash or RTS efforts the way this tried to do. You see, the biggest disappointment of Gollum is that it exhibits truly good, intriguing ideas, but fails to capitalize on them in ways that are fully satisfying or completely functional.

6.5/10

Wow, just wow... Lord of Ring: Gollum is truly, properly, actually, immensley EPIK and CELESTIAL in quality. First off, the optimization... WOW. It made me want to kill myse- I mean bust all over my computer with how many frames I was getting, I didn't know why the high framerate had a hyphen (-) before it though. I'm not a Lord of Ring fan since it's just a rip off of Harry Potter but this was made me realise that George RR Martin knows his stuf and is a great game designer.

As the great Dildo Baggin'''''s once said "I never truly ap'preciated art until I ha'd an argument will Gollum;;; of cour'se, Gollum won the argument.