We've been quite blessed with The Lord of the Rings games throughout the years. Be it the movie tie-ins, the Lego adventures, the Middle-earth Shadow of series, there have been many interesting and compelling The Lord of the Rings titles. But unfortunately, earlier this year, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum changed all of that and put a massive stain on this fantasy universe, and by extension put a huge amount of pressure on developer Free Range Games to not screw the pooch with its survival crafting title, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. Thankfully, it hasn't.
Return to Moria is one of the only projects in the entirety of the Middle-earth series that has looked to explore the Fourth Age and what happened after the events of The Lord of the Rings. As the title of the game suggests, it sees a group of dwarves led by the Fellowship's Gimli heading back to the mountain kingdom of Moria, with the intention of reclaiming it from goblins and the other nasty creatures that lurk within, and returning it to its former glory. The catch is that the story never really gets this far, as right at the beginning of the game you find your lone dwarf (or pair of dwarves if you team up with a friend) trapped in Moria with no clear way out following a cave-in, meaning you end up left with but one option - to venture deeper into the darkness in the hope of finding an alternative exit.
From here, the game throws all manner of survival mechanics at you. You have to manage hunger and fatigue, health and stamina, and various other minor systems, such as temperature and darkness, which if left unchecked will see you overcome with unhelpful debuffs that affect your dwarf until you fix them. The survival systems aren't as demanding as Sons of the Forest, for example, but you will need to pay attention if you intend to stay alive in the dark depths of the mountain.
To help keep you alive, your crafty dwarf is able to build and construct all manner of items and structures that will enable them to create a safe haven where they can take a breather, prepare food, store mined and collected resources, and more. This is a construction suite that reminds of Fallout 76 and other survival games with crafting elements, as it's more about piecing together defined building blocks to build the structure and facilities that you need. In fact in general, Return to Moria is less of a building game and more of an explorative crafting title.
And this is a key thing to know because unlike some survival crafting games, there is a story of sorts at the heart of Return to Moria. While you can take as much time as you like mining and building things, the aim is mainly to escape Moria and to do so you need to constantly wander through the abandoned halls, fighting off hordes of goblins and orcs, and discovering new materials and recipes that will enable you to build better quality items to mine through harder materials and allow you to battle with more dangerous threats. To ensure you know where to go, you follow waypoints that tend to lead you on the same path that the Fellowship of the Ring took before you, as you find notes from Gandalf that open the way to lore entries that add extra colour to the world. Essentially, imagine Minecraft, but instead of the game not holding your hand at all, you follow a set of objectives that tell you how to create better items, find rarer materials, and build useful facilities.
It's worth saying that while the game encourages you to follow a specific path, there is a fair amount of player agency involved too. At some parts of the adventure, for example, you will be told to mine through a certain wall, but to get through you will require a stronger pickaxe, a tool the game doesn't tell you how to acquire. Instead, you need to explore the surrounding area and find a solution by discovering new materials and items to unlock new crafting recipes. For this example, the solution meant repairing an old dormant forge and then defending it from a horde of goblins. Needless to say, this proved to be quite the challenge.
Return to Moria does face a few of the survival crafting genre issues. You can get stuck in routines as you constantly strive to discover and horde the materials that you need to craft more powerful items, and likewise as this is a game that's more about exploring horizontally than vertically, the sprawling level will mean you spend a huge amount of time simply walking from your home base and to the next objectives - at least until you discover new base locations along the way or find the rare materials needed to create fast travel markers. Then there are all the intricacies that the game is just downright horrible at explaining. Half of the challenge of Return to Moria is figuring out what material does what and where to find it. It's a game of trial and errors, which has its benefits at times, but does severely affect the pacing of this game.
Thankfully, the horde mechanics and the different additional objectives you will find on your journey do what they can to keep things fresh. Just as you get comfortable mining an ore vein, a goblin horde will attack, leaving your dwarf at the mercy of tens of enemies, and without proper preparation this will pretty much always mean death, leading you to panic until you overcome the horde. Likewise, the side objectives that pop up and ask you to open locked chests and or find and return collectibles do mean that you have something to do other than simply mining - even if as a dwarf this is your bread and butter.
With tons of customisation options and ways to build your dwarf as you see fit, a truly enormous world to explore, and competent cooperative elements that allow you to team up with a friend to conquer and survive Moria, there are a lot of things this game does well - especially for the avid The Lord of the Rings fan who has wanted nothing more than a game that lets them loose in a portion of Middle-earth. You'll never want to put down your pickaxe, similar to the way Minecraft inspired us all when it first started taking the world by storm.
So, sure the combat is a bit basic, the narrative middling at best, the enemy AI and actions are awful and highly predictable, the pacing too steady, and there are a fair collection of glitches when you mine and rip apart a wall with your pickaxe, but besides from these issues Return to Moria is good return for form for the usually rather fun The Lord of the Rings video games. And, it's a full game. A lot of survival crafting titles debut as Early Access projects, but Return to Moria is a complete experience from day one, and that should be celebrated in this age of paying full price for underbaked products that bear promises of grand distant futures. Bravo, Free Range Games.