If you are on the Premium tier of Sony’s PlayStation Plus subscription service, you can now have a go at both The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Baldur’s Gate 3, as part of the subscription’s trial offerings.
Users will be able to play up to an hour of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s trial, meanwhile, offers a more generous two hours of play time (although, given how vast the game actually is, this is really just a smidgen of the full release).
These games join the likes of Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7 Reunion and Sifu as titles PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers can try before they buy.
While both The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Baldur’s Gate 3 released this year, the games have seen wildly different success across the board.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was very poorly received on its release, with the game largely unplayable for many due to a myriad of bugs, performance issues, an erratic camera and unreliable controls.
In Digital Foundry’s tech review, Tom Morgan remarked he hadn’t played a game in “such a dire state” for years, since Shadow of Mordor.
Meanwhile, in our one out of five-star Gollum review, Eurogamer’s Christian Donlan called it “a well-intentioned mess”.
“It’s heart-breaking,” Donlan wrote. “Gollum has lovely design moments and a real sense of pluck to it – of a team reaching to do justice to something they love. But it has too many problems, and only some of them can be sorted with patches.”
On the flip side, Baldur’s Gate 3 has received scores of praise ever since it made its debut this summer. While it did also release with some issues, these didn’t mar the overall experience.
We gave it an impressive four out of five stars in Eurogamer’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review.
“Developer Larian seems to pull off the unlikely, and make an RPG that feels truly collaborative,” Ruth Cassidy wrote following her time with the game.
So, will you be dipping your toes into either of these fantasy worlds now there is a trial on offer?
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