Remember how popular The Lord of The Rings used to be? The trend of extremely long movies split into sequels started with Peter Jackson’s films, and that popularity was partially transferred to gaming with a couple of solid The Lord of the Rings titles – but that was a long time ago. Today The Lord of the Rings is making a slight comeback with The Rings of Power show and other newly announced projects.
A new game set in Tolkien’s iconic fantasy world was announced somewhere in between, at a very strange time. The first announcement for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum came in March 2019, near the end of the last generation when this title was announced as one of the first PlayStation 5 exclusives. Now, four years later, Gollum has arrived, but also on new and old Xbox consoles, PC, and even PlayStation 4. So, what happened there, and what do the reviews say – was it worth the wait? Let’s find out.
What is The Lord of the Rings Gollum Metacritic Score?
The Lord of the Rings Gollum was released on May 25, 2023, with a review embargo scheduled for launch day – which is almost never a good sign. Now that the first reviews have been published on the review score aggregator site Metacritic, we can see the following.
The PlayStation 5 version has a Metacritic score of 38 with 15 negative reviews, 6 mixed, and 0 positive ones. This is not good, obviously. I mean, I expected it to get some harsh reviews because of the poor technical state the game is in, but this turned out to be much worse even than some of the lowest expectations.
With only 12 reviews so far, the PC version of the game currently has a slightly better Metascore of 43 – which is generous when we consider that the game pulls 30fps with NVIDIA RTX 4080, and 48fps on RTX 4090 (via Hardware Times). Although judging by the reviews, technical issues are only one part of the problem in a game that a couple of reviewers compared to mid-2000s movie tie-in games. Yes, it seems that it’s that bad.
When it comes to Xbox Series and last-gen Xbox One consoles, it seems no reviewer has played Gollum on these platforms so far, so there is no Metacritic score yet. Almost the same situation is with the PlayStation 4 version of the game where we currently have only one review with a rating of 4/10.
Related: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Trophies and Achievements Listed
What is The Lord of the Rings Gollum Opencritic Score?
The situation on the Opencritic is very similar, with Gollum receiving the dreaded “Weak” OpenCritic Rating, and just 4% of Critics actually recommended the game.
Well, it is what it is. Although the expectations from this long-delayed title were extremely low, the disappointment is still there and The Lord of the Rings fans should possibly look for their fix elsewhere.
