If you hadn’t heard developers Free Range Games have worked with publishers North Beach Games to bring a new Lord of the Rings video game to life, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. With 2023 already leaving us a bad taste in our mouths with The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, I was reluctant to play another Lord of the Rings game but opted in and took one for the team anyways. Let’s see if they were able to improve on the franchise name!
Gameplay and Story
LotR: Return to Moria is a survival base-building game based in the mines of Moria where you play as a Dwarf(s) that gets separated from their crew because of a nasty cave-in. In true LotR fashion you take a long trek to try and regroup with them. Along the way you learn more about what has happened in the mines and encounter enemies and bunker down for the night by gathering supplies and building a base.
The gameplay at first is exciting like most survival games, but there’s always the point that makes or breaks the game. For this game, that point is right after the tutorial stage. The tutorial leads you to your initial base and then the rest of the game takes you on the explore the mines.
Gathering materials come in the same form that you’re used to. Pick the basics up off the floor and build tools so you can mine them from the walls. One cool thing that I appreciated from the game, while you’re mining there’s an option to sing, like Dwarves do while at work, and after your character finishes the song you get a slight buff. In a bit of a Monkey’s paw situation, I don’t see a point in that mechanic because there wasn’t anything that I noticed that affected that nor was there a cool down period, so why not just always have that buff and always have your Dwarf start singing while mining.
Combat in mines is probably my least favorite part of the game. Every enemy has the exact same attack pattern. It’s either a single swipe or a one, two, three hit combo with the third hit dealing extra damage. To make matters even more plain, you have the same attack patterns, no matter the weapon you use. Combat isn’t something that can be avoided either, every couple of nights one of your bases will get raided. The raids are just waves of enemies that come in the night and try to break into your base. The problem is they feel like they last 45 real minutes when in reality it’s probably about 5 or 6 minutes. They happen way to often for what they are.
Speaking of bases throughout the game you will need to build multiple, but to me they didn’t feel like bases as much as they felt like DIY checkpoints. There are a lot of areas along the way with halfway built bases that you can just takeover and make your new spawn point instead of building a full base from scratch. You could build yourself a large ‘home base’ where you store everything and use smaller bases as spawn points for quick item recovery.
Graphics and Sound
I do like the way the game looks. While it can be very dark, especially at night, there are some really nice looking areas in the cave like the Elf area with the sky lights in the ceiling. At night on the other hand, prepare for a lot of orange lights. Inside a small little base, I needed to put up around 10 wall torches so I could see easily. Walking around the cave at night feels impossible at times for this reason. Without a torch in hand or a ton of torches places around it won’t be an easy task to navigate, so be prepared to craft a lot of torches.
I don’t really have any praise for the sound, it doesn’t really sound like you’re in a mine and the voice acting reminds me of Gollum a little too much. But as for the sound design, it’s not the worst, just not anything worth highlighting.
Feedback
Unfortunately, my feedback is to just restart. Two of the biggest parts of the game, if not THE biggest parts of the game are extremely lack-luster. Base building just doesn’t feel important, I don’t feel that they really give you any reason to build bases other than upgrading or repairing equipment and frankly while I was playing I’d just put up a quick lean-to and do everything on the fly and that was more satisfying. But, I never built a home base because I never really felt the need to.
Then there’s the combat, it’s fine to have repetitive combat. In a melee based combat system there is only so much you can do especially in a game like this. But if you know that there’s not a whole lot of diversity there, create the diversity by making creative ways to get around it. It came to a point where I would literally build quick platforms and platform my way around enemies instead of fighting them because I just wanted to get through. I think the main way to fix it would be just to have less encounters and WAY less raids.
Conclusion
Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria is okay at best. There are by far worse games out there, but it’s unfair what they have done with this very cool concept. When I played this game I expected an epic journey where I would get to build an awesome mining base but instead I got a walking sim with some enemy poking and tent pitching. I’m just confused on who made the decision that Lord of the Rings games were going to be bad from now on.
