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The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria is a wasted opportunity and a waste of time

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The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™

7.7

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SHOULD I PLAY THE LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN TO MORIA?

Skip this and play any of a thousand better survival crafting games out there, almost all of which are more original and more fun than this dud. While the idea of exploring a legendary dwarven mine in Middle-earth is a good one on paper, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria is set in the Fourth Age—this is the peaceful “Age of Men” that followed the War of the Ring, in which everything interesting about The Lord of the Rings has already happened. That’s very much the case in the mines of Moria, where I was hard-pressed to find anything resembling fun.

TIME PLAYED

I played about three hours of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, and precious little happened in that time that feels noteworthy enough to write about. I created a custom character, watched as he got separated from the group of dwarves Gimli was leading to reclaim the mines, and began setting up a little operation deep within Moria to mount an expedition back to the main party. I fought off wolves and goblins, gathered stone, lit dark areas with torches, forged a few weapons, and got killed by a cave bear. Mostly I wished I was playing something else.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT THE LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN TO MORIA?

• A promising concept. In The Lord of the Rings, Moria is a fascinating and creepy location—a grand underground dwarven kingdom abandoned after the dwarves inadvertently unleashed a powerful evil deep below the surface. There are certainly hints of that to be found in The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, although most areas did seem too well-lit for what’s meant to be a scary, dark place.

• You can sing while mining. When I found a valuable ore vein, I would start swinging my pickaxe at it, and I’d often have the option to start singing a dwarven song by pressing E. My dwarf only knew one song, but singing while mining seemed extremely dwarfy.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT THE LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN TO MORIA?

• Terrible combat. Fighting wolves, goblins, and bats in The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria was a boring chore every time they showed up. Blocking mitigates all damage, so I’d hold my shield up and absorb an attack, then get in a couple attacks of my own. Rinse, lather, repeat. There’s no target lock-on, so it was sometimes difficult to know whether a strike would actually land, but I never had to vary up my approach. There was never any screen-shake or other feedback to lend weight to my hits either, so weapons felt floaty and immaterial. In short: fighting isn’t fun.

• Maddeningly small inventory space. Resources in The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria were frustratingly scarce, particularly once I needed coal and iron. I had to make a long walk to scout out a place to mine these, then ferry them back to wherever I had my forge set up to smelt iron ingots, using only a dozen or so inventory slots for all the resources and gear I needed. Having resources scattered so far across a dark map that wasn’t fun to explore made every trip a slog, and the small inventory guaranteed I had to make lots of those trips.

• Poor visuals. Having simple graphics doesn’t mean a game has to look bad—just look at Valheim, which uses a throwback PlayStation 1 visual style to create stunningly beautiful scenes. Return to Moria, on the other hand, just looks dated and homely. Torches barely do anything to pierce the darkness, while other areas are inexplicably sunlit all the time, even at night. Enemies all look the same, iron ore veins look like patches of refined, hammered copper, and all the hallways look boring and identical.

• Poor building placement tools. Early on in Return to Moria, the only things I had to build were simple platforms to help me scale walls or cross gaps. Once I opened up some new building options, though, things got frustrating. Wall torches rarely align with walls, which often made it impossible to put them in places where I felt they’d look right. Objects can only be turned 90 degrees at a time, and so in certain areas it was not possible to align furniture with the existing architecture. After accidentally breaking a flight of stairs in an old workshop I found, I learned that I couldn’t rebuild them because I did not have access to making any kind of stairs in the build menu (even though I could build walls, floors, doorways, and windows at that point).

• A day/night cycle that does literally nothing. Return to Moria would ominously tell me that the darkness of night had fallen, which was good because there was no other way I would have been able to tell. The sun still shone brightly in the areas where it came through the ceilings, and the dark areas were still dark. I never noticed any uptick in enemy activity during either the day or night. My dwarf periodically got weary, and so I’d sleep, but it made no difference at all whether this happened during the day or night. Maybe this becomes important later in the game, but I won’t be finding out.

💬 Will you be delving into the ancient dwarven mines in The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, or do you already have a favorite survival crafting game? Tell me about it in the comments.

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