The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™

I have thousands of hours in Conan Exiles, 7 Days to Die, Valheim, and Enshrouded. I enjoy survival-craft games... I hate this game. I've tried... I've tried hard. Hosting the game with friends... this game is awful. Avoid at all costs.

Boring and tedious. This game definitely had potential to be a great survival game but unfortunately what it IS, is a waste of time. The core gameplay loop involves gathering resources, establishing a base/camp, crafting new gear, venturing into the next area and fighting orcs -> repeat until you reach the end. The combat is very clunky and unsatisfying. When you're fighting multiple enemies you tend to get locked onto a random target in front of you and then slide at them like you're using commando in MW2. Enemies have very inconsistent respawn timers and can at times spawn right in front of you. There's very little meaningful variety in the weapons you can wield, all of them behave more or less the same. There's no classes or different combat roles, you run at the enemy, spam heavy attacks and block if you have a shield. Or you could use a bow and spam arrows at a distance instead. If you ask me, the bow is best suited for destroying certain environmental hazards and killing flying enemies because how little damage it deals to anything you could fight with a melee weapon. Exploration and base building are the game's strong points. The environments in the game are certainly pretty to look at but there didn't seem to be much point in exploring once you had the minimum required resources to move to the next zone. I imagine you can build some cool bases in this but when every other aspect of the game is lacking, what's the point of building anything cool? I'll rather go and play a game that has good base building AND is fun to play or gives me unrestricted creativity if building is the sole focus. I also cannot be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to go gather a bunch of resources in this game to build a massive base because how soul wrenchingly slow and janky it is to gather anything. There's also a day/night cycle in the game, which doesn't really make sense, you're in a mountain... It felt like it was constantly dark and cold (due to it being "night time"), meaning exploration would be all the more painful. This system doesn't need to exist and feels like the devs were desperate to add things into their game to make it seem like there's depth to it. To make things worse to skip time and get back your stamina, everyone needs to be sleeping at the same time. This is a problem unless all the players stick together at all times, because when someone is exploring far away and others are gathering resources or fighting enemies, you need to wait for the explorer to either make a camp (which requires certain resources you might not be able to find or even mine at the time of need) or come all the way back to base while everyone else just sits alt-tabbed watching YouTube. WHY THE HELL DID YOU NOT MAKE IT SO THAT EVERYONE CAN REST INDEPENDENTLY TO REGAIN STAMINA, LIKE EVERY OTHER SURVIVAL GAME?!? And why does it cost coal to make a small campfire instead of just wood when the whole point of the small campfire is to establish a small camp while out exploring? The survival aspect of this game boils down to plate spinning, i.e. keeping your food bar filled for the sake of it. It's not a gradient where hunger gradually makes you weaker with different debuffs nor is there much of a reason to cook some of the more demanding recipes, you may as well just cook the bare minimum to get your health back and then eat dust from the ground to keep the hunger bar filled. It's also completely arbitrary that cooked food spoils (very quickly too) but raw ingredients (which you can still eat and find plenty of) do not. For some reason you also cannot have multiple dishes on a dining table at the same time. The level design has been irritating to navigate if anything due to there being no easy way to go up and down. You can build rope ladders but the ladder is pre-attached to a platform and is very short, meaning you need to build a super janky daisy chain of jagged platforms OR you use quick platforms without the rope ladder to do the exact same thing but with a higher frequency. Both of these methods end up making the environment look hideous with riddled platforms like it's a Rust server that's three months deep into a wipe... This game is a solid 3/10, it is devoid of passion and care. Simply not worth your money or time.

I am glad I bought the game for the voice acting, music, and super cool world. However... The camera was too spinny. The maps erased most walls after entering a room, the dashboard map would sometimes show multiple levels at once, and it was initially unclear the arrow pointed to the camera view (not mine). Enemies often spawned in walls and could attack from there. There were glitches that locked my character in place, but they could be solved by leaving the game and restarting - except for at the lower deep drain pump where it really glitched and was only resolved when the mushroom tree roots started doing damage and killed me (but not resolved until killed twice). The Bone Horde fight gliched to be endless, but also solved by restarting the game. The tutorial should have included notes about jumping to progress initially and on chaining quick platforms. Plus, it should have been made clear Durin Lamps don't work unitl the song is sung. The game should have included a Black Diamond in the Westgate chest and one in each orc chest of the Elven Wood. Being attacked when accessing the menu allowed for ambushes - which knocked me off the Eastern Stairs and killed. This game was so close to being my favorite ever, but the camera made it difficult to impossible to play.

Valheim, but as a dorf underground in Middle Earth. Sounds incredible. And it could be. But the combat is too light and floaty; there's no weight or crunchyness to it. And the real death sentence is the optimization; the game usually runs at 80-100 FPS for me, but it frequently tanks to ~20 FPS for no clear reason, and it will hover in the low 20s for long periods of time before shooting back up. I'm also experiencing this awful mouse cursor flickering bug that sounds like it was introduced by the photo mode update, but looks like it never got fixed and never will be. My CPU / GPU are pretty old (specs attached), but I can't identify a reason for these massive drops. Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077 both have more consistent FPS than this game for me.

This game is so miserable and awful in so many weird pointless ways. The stamina system is psychotic, so you can use infinite stamina potions. The weapons and armor break nearly instantly, so you can use the nifty repair station. You can't roll off of edges, so you don't accidentally fall off of edges. So many intentional willful design decisions that make the game FEEL BAD TO PLAY. This game is not hard, it's not grindy, it's not even low quality, it's just got a pile of design decisions that make it an absolute slog. The combat is like an N64 game tried to do something new. The build lore buffs are literally MEANINGLESS. The only saving grace was the lore, and even then, a lot of it was just "Wizard was here lol. -Wizard"

Game is good but the devs are lying out their butts about crossplay. I've tried every way to join my friends on Xbox to no avail. I did the port forwarding and everything, no dice. So if you want to crossplay pick a different game

Nothing kills my enthusiasm for a game quicker than a game breaking bug that wipes 16 hours of progress. I might come back to it later but i wasn't having that much fun to begin with.

Dig holes, Kill orcs and goblins, Rebuild civilization. Honestly I can think of worse dwarf related games. I'm half way down the mine and still not bored. There's some tedious stuff, but so much to explore, those are forgivable. I'm not big on Crafting Survival, but this one hit the right spot.

Würde ich das Spiel empfehlen? Ja. Es ist jedoch ein "Ja, aber". Vorab: Ich habe des Spiel alleine im Kampagnenmodus gespielt. "The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria" ist für mich als Tolkien-Fan eine wunderbare Reise in eine immersive Welt. Moria ist stellenweite sehr ausladend, sehr vielschichtig und zeigt große Tiefen innerhalb des Berges. Es wird eine immersive Geschichte verfolgt, die erlebbar und für Tolkien-Fans mit dem Bekannten verknüpfbar ist. Man kann Orte besuchen, die etwa aus den Filmen bekannt sind, wie dem Grab von Balin. Handwerkssystem, Kampfsystem, usw. funktionieren grundsätzlich, machen Sinn und auch Spaß. Und dann kommt das Aber. Das Spiel ist enorm - was etwa repetitive Anteile des Spiels angeht. Jede Freischaltung einer neuen Schmiede, jedes Erringen eines Siegs über einen Abschnitt von Goblins, Orks und Uruks? Folgt immer dem selben Muster. Jedes Mal die selbe Leier. Dazu kommt, dass mitunter Gegner dem Spieler begegnen, die weit über dem Level dessen liegen, was verfügbar ist. Das führt dazu, dass einem der eigene Charakter gerne mal über längere Zeit "I need a better weapon for this!" um die Ohren schallert. Ein weiteres Problem ist, dass die Ressourcen endlich sind. Ja, man muss so sehen, dass man damit haushält - aber man kann eben auch nicht endlos viele Optionen probieren und muss mitunter die Karte sehr intensiv durchsuchen, um fehlende Erze zu finden oder das letzte Fitzelchen eines freischaltbaren Rezepts. Alles in allem würde ich das Spiel mit einer soliden 7/10 bewerten. Es macht für mich einiges richtig, aber in einigem ist auch Luft nach oben. Diese Rezension ist aber auch eingetrübt von Nostalgie und Verbundenheit zum Tolkien-Universum. Für jemanden ohne eine solche Verbundenheit mag die Bewertung womöglich schlechter ausfallen.

This game is such a gem! Perfect mix of fighting and base building but also chillaxed mining and fun. It worked really well for us in that you could go off and do your own things, but really needed to come together to take on the next area or horde. I think it took me about half the game to understand how to read the map and I was generally in a perpetual state of lost, but that was half the fun. Really great, cant recommend enough.