It is frustrating to play as a character who is looking ahead and should see incoming objects but not being able to see them yourself, and die because of it. The other is a Crash Bandicoot-style run toward the camera, made miserable by the imprecise platforming and inability to see obstacles until moments before you need to avoid them. One places Gollum on a moving object and requires careful dodging oncoming obstructions and archers, and manages to be one of only a handful of fun sections to play through. Which, again, is not good.Ī few chase sequences change up the pace, though they are a bit of a mixed bag. It makes sense you can’t choke beasts like spiders, but other humanoid races like elves apparently have invincible throats, eliminating the only method to bypass enemies apart from stealth. Is that orc wearing a hat? Decent chance he’s strangle-proof. However, what defines a helmet in this game is broadly open to interpretation.
PRECIOUS LITTLE MOMENTS FULL
This makes sense for someone in full battle regalia - Sméagol’s grubby mitts won’t bend steel, after all. First, it doesn’t work on anyone with a helmet. You do have the option to strangle enemies, but it comes with some odd caveats. There’s no combat per se, which makes sense because Gollum is no fighter when it comes to any opponent larger than a hobbit. Eventually some of the Orcs get crossbows, but even then the threat is minimal. I was able to navigate a long stealth section in the Animal Pits of Barad-dûr by just jumping and grabbing an overhang anytime someone spotted me. Because the enemy AI is surprisingly terrible, doing something as simple as standing on a table or knee-high rock can make you completely immune to capture. Gollum’s only tools are his ability to sneak quietly, throw rocks, and disappear in tall grass or shadows. There’s no cat-and-mouse game of outsmarting enemies using interesting abilities and clever level design as you do in something like Dishonored or Hitman, you just exploit their painfully obvious blind spots with no objective outside of reaching the designated point. These are issues that plagued mediocre stealth games 15 years ago, and it’s jarring to see them in 2023. Enemies have extremely limited parol patterns, are terribly nearsighted, and seem to suffer from acute, rapid-onset amnesia, forgetting Gollum ever existed not long after losing sight of him. Any time Gollum needs to go from point A to B undetected, it’s going to be a slog. Rather than a throwback, it comes across as outdated a poor facsimile of classics like the Prince of Persia series.įinally there are the stealth segments, which are simply bad. The paths are rigidly defined, and often involve blind jumps or best guesses at what the next intended handle is. Having experienced a modern Assassin's Creed or Tomb Raider game, here it feels far too easy to jump toward the correct point and fall to your death because you drifted to one side, or missed the part of the ledge that has the white line that establishes exactly where you can grab. Spacious rooms with handles to climb, walls to run, and leaps to take bring a faster pace of action, but the loose and floaty way Gollum moves and imprecise controls make it feel like something from the PlayStation 2 era. The platforming phases are more compelling, but still poorly designed. Trying to get anywhere involves too little speed, too much waiting, and an unfortunate amount of hearing Gollum choking on his own breath.
It could be fun to run around with Gollum, thanks to his surprising sprint speed, but he has a stamina meter that depletes in just a few seconds and takes far longer to replenish. It never feels like there’s any point to it, just busywork.
PRECIOUS LITTLE MOMENTS SERIES
There’s always some conceptually different scenario, like crawling through small openings to detonate explosives, but functionally it’s a series of marches across the same areas over and over again. There’s the chores phase, in which Gollum goes from one waypoint to another to complete some menial task. There are generally three phases to any level, and they range from uninteresting to just plain bad.
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