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. 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.

Lord of the rings gollum fight gif