The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria takes the survival crafting genre into the dangerous mines of Middle-earth, reflavoring familiar elements with the charm of stouthearted dwarves and the threat of goblins, orcs, and worse. Developed by Free Range Games and published by North Beach Games, Return to Moria is positioned as a potential redemption for recent forays into Tolkien's world, as The Lord of the Rings: Gollum met with a strikingly negative reception earlier this year. Return to Moria doesn't quite find riches beneath the ground, but it does manage to avoid stumbling entirely on its way into the depths.

Unlike the majority of The Lord of the Rings media, Return to Moria picks up after the events of the Fellowship's journey and ventures into the Fourth Age of Middle-earth. The proud warrior Gimli calls his fellow Dwarves to retake their once-glorious works, but things immediately go awry for one unlucky figure (or party) that finds themselves trapped inside. Getting out will require delving deeper before starting a new ascent, facing threats of mounting significance and scrounging for supplies along the way.

Return To Moria Has A Solid Gameplay Loop

No survival crafting game can, well, survive without a good rhythm at its core, and The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria acquits itself generally well in this regard. Even when faced with setbacks, that necessary sense of steady advancement remains consistent, driving both by the inherent momentum of dungeon crawling downward and a regular stream of discoveries. Progress is built on multiple pillars, from upgrading equipment to repairing great forges to taking down enemy encampments and bosses that stand in the way of riches beyond.

Early areas of the game might see shoddy camps come and go quickly, but as moving forward grows in complexity, building proper homes or retrofitting them out of major abandoned structures becomes more appealing. Enough threats are in play to make a base feel like a welcoming bastion, where health and sanity can be restored and buffs granted through recipes, rituals, and plenty of Dwarven ale. Keeping meters full starts out as a fairly casual endeavor and becomes more intense in lower parts of the mine, where darkness grows more dangerous and an increasing reliance on fast travel can burn through rations at greater speeds.

Return to Moria isn't short, which could be either good or bad depending on the angle. Playing alone, the loop might start to wear a bit thin, as some later areas can take a solid chunk of time to complete. Although having a full party loses out on some of the tension of a singleplayer campaign, it offers the more appealing option in the long run. Regrouping at camp after a narrow escape feels good with companions, and the deliberate nature of many tasks makes for the best kind of social background material.

Clunky Combat Relies On Quantity Over Quality

The one pillar of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria's gameplay that feels weaker than the rest is combat, which can be intense and occasionally engaging but rarely feels particularly good. Although familiar basics of charging swings and dodge-rolling on a stamina bar are in play, nothing moves with the fluidity or precision necessary to make things properly click. Creatures like trolls can occasionally necessitate some strategic one-on-one fighting, but most encounters fall back on spawning frequent enemies — sometimes very transparently dropped in — rather than valuable duels with any single foe.

Camp raids show an early glimpse of the threat of raiding orcs and goblins, which leads to the significantly more tiring hordes that can start raging in lower levels of the mine. The approach is perhaps at its worst in full boss encounters, which back up vaguely unimpressive big bads with endless minions. Like many aspects of Mines of Moria, having more players involved improves things, leaning into the sense of an epic battle against numerous foes. Playing with only a couple companions makes hordes annoying, and going it alone dials up the terror but brushes aside the fun.

If anything helps combat limp along, it's weapon progression, which tends to drop in a new option or two whenever the sameness is becoming truly exhausting. Making use of a bow for the first time or upgrading to a battleaxe that can deal devastating charged swings can provide a shakeup in timing, although the lack of satisfyingly complex or well-animated enemy attack patterns makes mastery fairly stale. Minor additional pleasures like enchantments (endearingly including the one that Bilbo's blade Sting made famous) do little to offset how tiring slashing, blocking, and rolling in combat with a seemingly interminable mid-boss can be.

A Charming Core Needs A Bit More Iteration

At the moment, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria feels like many survival crafting games do when they first hit the market — promising but unfinished. Bugs are generally minor, mostly manifesting in animation errors, occasionally too-long loading screens, and a lighting fluctuation that makes it unclear how dark the game is supposed to be. More pressing is the sense that the game could do with a couple months of community , as an overall effective design framework is littered with choices that prompt more bemusement than anything else. Likewise, the procedural generation works well enough on the whole, but some recurring formats for dead ends prove reliably uninspiring.

Graphically, Return to Moria delivers the essentials but not much more, although that's enough to outdo some major genre peers. In dark areas with shafts of light, things can look fairly nice, even if the aforementioned lighting inconsistency can shift the game into a comparatively washed-out look that sometimes persists. The larger issue is performance, which seems frustratingly poor considering the general lack of impressive fidelity. Even on strong hardware, it's easily prone to slowdown in certain situations, which can feel silly when the gaggle of NPCs dipping the framerate are phasing awkwardly into the ground as they die.

The more-ish attraction to its progression might seem like the main reason to shrug off various gripes, but there are plenty of survival crafting games that can boast similar appeal. What really gives Return to Moria its draw is the charm that it finds in Middle-earth. The setting might tap into fear for its overall atmosphere — which it does to surprising efficacy — but the touches of humanity are its real heart. Tolkien's Dwarves have a certain something that has spawned countless imitators since The Lord of the Rings was first written, and when Return to Moria lets them together in mining songs, that spark comes to the forefront.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria needs some work if it's ever going to stand at the forefront of survival crafting games, but it does deliver most of the basics in a way that goes down easy. At the moment, it's easiest to recommend for fans of Tolkien's work who have a party of friends at the ready, as the gameplay won't hold the same appeal for a solo player uninterested in the source material. Dwarven enthusiasts should find some reward in heeding Gimli's summons, but those on the fence about The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria might be able to ignore the urgency in his call.

The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria is available now on PC and releases December 2023 for PS5. Screen Rant was provided with a PC code for the purpose of this review.