Lord Of The Rings fans are begging for Battle For Middle-earth remakes

The Lord of the Rings franchise has had some incredible games over the years, but the newly released The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is absolutely not one of them.

After numerous delays, Gollum finally released on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Series X/S yesterday, and the review scores were catastrophically low. At the time of writing, the PS5 version of the game has a critic score of 40 on Metacritic, which also makes it the worst-rated game of the year so far. Yikes.

Take a look at the trailer for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum below.

Needless to say, the whole situation has made fans even more thankful for the golden age of LOTR games, and on Reddit, everyone’s been feeling very nostalgic over the Battle for Middle-earth series. The two real-time strategy games (which released in 2004 and 2006, respectively) are fan-favourites for a reason, but sadly, the official game servers got shut down at the end of 2010, and obviously, given their age, they’re also now very dated. For all those reasons, gamers are now begging for remakes of the original game and its sequel.

“If they want to make a bunch of money using the Lord of the Rings franchise, just remaster this game! Instead, we get games like Gollum,” Reddit user Zjoee posted, along with an image of Battle for Middle-earth II’s box art.

“Dude, for real! Loved this game. The first one was really good as well,” ThraxedOut replied. “True! Something about this generation of LOTR games really immersed you in Middle-earth,” wrote OnlyPenguin. “My childhood right there. This is what made me fall in love with the strategy game genre,” added Circumflexboy.

Whatever Lord of the Rings games we get next, they’re almost certainly going to be better than Gollum, anyway. That still doesn't mean they'll be good, though.