The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria enters a very familiar gameplay loop in a world that isn’t quite fit for purpose. The premise is one that should fill any Lord of the Rings fan with feelings of excitement and wonder: being able to explore Moria to your heart’s content is almost unheard of in video games, with the exception of Mines of Moria extension for The Lord of the Rings Online. But Return to Moria is an open world survival game in a linear environment. The mechanisms are constantly competing against each other and frustrate more than they entertain.
Set after the events of the main trilogy during the Fourth Age of Middle-earth, Lord Gimli – once again voiced by John Rhys-Davies – has summoned all the dwarves to Moria in an attempt to reclaim the land from goblins, orcs and cave trolls. , and a host of other enemies who have settled in the once beautiful kingdom of Khazad-dûm. Return to Moria begins with you becoming stranded more than 200 fathoms deep after the floor beneath you gives way and separates you from the mining company.
Your one core goal, above all else, is to find your way back to your fellow dwarves. To do this, you will have to explore and ultimately conquer the entire famous underground labyrinth, which is fraught with all kinds of enemies. There are many of the usual survival game elements present, from starting with weak tools and weapons and gradually upgrading them as you find rarer materials and build more capable machines, to hunger and fatigue meters that limit the amount you can get in a set doing. period of time.
Image: Free Range Games/North Beach Games via Polygon
That’s why it’s all the more baffling that the world you can explore is so limiting. To take Valheim, for example, the most similar comparison in the genre. Certain biomes in the Viking themed survival game are more difficult, with monsters above your level and rarer materials that you have to progress to gradually; but you still have the freedom to explore wherever you want and make mistakes. Accidentally stumbling into an area far beyond your capabilities and then fleeing with your tail between your legs is part of the fun. It adds intrigue and a desire to become strong enough and discover the secrets that a high-level area holds.
Return to Moria is devoid of these moments because, despite the world being procedurally generated, you are underground. And instead of letting the player choose a direction and start digging, the map is made up of tiles, with corridors that can be dug out in very specific locations. You can explore a bit off the beaten track and find areas you can return to later, but there’s little to hold your interest. There are references to the film trilogy everywhere you can come across – Gandalf has left a plethora of notes warning of what will happen in the next area, and you can find, for example, the room where Frodo was saved by his mithril shirt. But overall this is a survival game with a Lord of the Rings theme, rather than saying anything meaningful about the lore or the world it’s in – moments of ha, that’s neatbefore quickly moving on, rather than anything that sticks with you.
This tile-based system is even more frustrating, as it adds a suffocating linearity to a genre that thrives on open-endedness. In other survival games, exploration is most rewarding when you do it gradually around the place you choose to set up shop, meaning you never wander. at far from the safety and comfort of your bed. You can store all your hard-earned minerals, health-replenishing foods, and other resources in a chest, which expands over time in a sort of concentric circle around your base.
Image: Free Range Games/North Beach Games via Polygon
Return to Moria gives you all the tools for these types of exploration loops, but essentially pushes you in a straight line as you look for a way out to get back to the company. This linearity is indeed boring, but it also permeates the entire loop of resource collection. By the time I reached the titular Mines of Moria, the journey back to my home base to retrieve the valuable resources I left behind had become a long trek, taking up much of the game’s day. It was lengthened thanks to the amounts of patrolling goblins, wolves, and bears hanging out in the hallways, which would probably be much more manageable if you played with friends, but solo they made it more of a challenge than it needed to be.
Fast travel would be a simple solution to these frustrations, but unlocking it requires black diamonds, a resource that can only be found during horde attacks – which, if you play alone and not with friends, are extremely difficult to survive – or from orc chests, which seem to have a fairly low failure rate. Killing bosses can also reward you with black diamonds, but these are few and far between. You must then spend this on your base to either create a map piece from scratch or rebuild a destroyed map piece. But you have to do this on each individual basis to designate them as fast travel locations, and if you’ve dragged yourself all the way back to your original cabin, you should have no reason to go back there once you’ve done that. collected your left behind items. So fast travel is only an option after it would be most useful.
Image: Free Range Games/North Beach Games via Polygon
All this back and forth travel is made even more painful by the lackluster, two-dimensional combat. There are a number of different types of weapons at your disposal once you reach Orc Town (the region with the first boss in the game, after about 8-10 hours), such as a sword, maul or battle axe, but they offer little aside of strengths against the different types of enemies. Light attack, heavy attack or block: those are the three options available to you, and the janky enemy AI, which causes them to get stuck in the terrain or run after you, makes it all the more annoying.
Return to Moria isn’t the worst offender in a sea of bad survival games, and there’s certainly fun to be had exploring the depths of Khazad-dûm if you’re with friends – but as a mostly solo dwarf, progress is slow, combat is frustrating and exploration contains far too much regression in the linear world you find yourself in. There’s a certain satisfaction in upgrading my gear and taking down stronger enemies, and in the end I still want to get back to Lord Gimli. But the game’s structure is at odds with its mechanics, and the disappointing combat doesn’t help. With a few patches, this could become a survival game that rivals the more popular entries in the genre, but as it stands, perhaps the dwarves should have let the orcs claim Moria and build their new kingdom elsewhere.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria was released on October 24 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code from North Beach Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.