The Lord of the Rings franchise has its unfair share of bad video game adaptations, with the tie-in movies for The Two Towers and The Return of the King marking the peak of them. With the garbage that was the unfortunate outcome of the Gollum game, the cautious optimism for Return to Moria was somewhat tempered. Can developer Free Range Games’ survival crafting game really be a good fit for the subject matter? Where in the timeline does it exist, and who can make a cameo appearance?
Gimli is the main returning character in this Fourth Age adventure. Following on after the Fellowship’s eventful campaign against Sauron and Saruman, Gimli has returned to Moria with the intent of reclaiming the region for the dwarves and reigniting the community his cousin Balin established in the past. When playing the campaign mode, players are introduced to the Fourth Age via some rather nice cutscenes showing off the sort of visual style the game is aiming for, while Gimli exposits some information before cutting to them blowing their way into Moria, causing the player to fall down a big hole into the tutorial.
From here, the story is light, with only the occasional pointer scene pushing players onwards, with some pretty decent moments for a survival title. The writing and world of the script features are perfectly Lord of the Rings, which gives it a nice air of a tie-in game.
Gameplay is exactly what one might expect. Collect resources to make tools, and fix and build devices to refine the resources for making bigger and better tools. As always, the gameplay loop is quite cathartic at a basic level, offering plentiful interesting ways to build camps, and explore or fight through the mines. What is an interestingly unique hook here, though, is the emphasis on mining; after all, it’s what dwarves do!
After creating a personal dwarf avatar, players will be able to eat, drink, make fire and most importantly, build simple platforms. These gravity-defying platforms offer a way to scale vertical surfaces, which, at least to begin with, is quite simple and relatively safe. Later on, though, the dwarf will be building walkways over chasms as they try and mine the rich ores. This verticality is really fun to engage with once the difficulty starts rising.
Combat is a fairly simple affair with basic combos and enemy behaviours, but the fun comes from creating bigger and better weapons to overcome harder challenges. This is something the player learns quite quickly after getting besieged by goblins on the first night in the mines. Making defensive bases and nice, sharp axes is key to surviving the deeper areas of Moria, where the enemies are both harder and more numerous.
Combat aside, though, the best gameplay element comes in the form of multiplayer antics. When playing together (and alone for some parts), there are opportunities for silly little group actions that feel like something right out of Tolkien’s books. If all players grab a tankard of ale, they can sing together and dance; it really gives the game a unique atmosphere, and it’s funny to boot. They also sing while mining, and though the songs do repeat, this reviewer always found it to be a laugh and generally quite pleasing.
The visuals take on a nice, balanced mix of cartoony realism with rather nice character models and art direction. The internals of Moria are well varied, though obviously feature a lot of dark grey stony areas. There are plenty of unbelievable sections like elven quarters that offer variety at the expense of making full sense in lore terms. These areas are usually reasonably populated with trees and bushes and cool bits of elven architecture, and the freedom to explore different Middle-earth cultural bits and pieces. Enemies are varied as well, using unique designs for each type, which helps keep the game a little more interesting. The user interface can be convoluted when it comes to things like crafting and sorting equipment, but once learned, it’s completely serviceable.
The other parts of the presentation, like audio, are also great with a fair bit of decent voice acting, especially from Gimli, courtesy of Welshman John Rhys-Davies. Naturally, with the focus on dwarven people, the voices use a range of Scottish and Irish-ish accents, and all of the actors give it a decent go, though dialogue is quite sparingly used. The songs are also a highlight, as mentioned before, and the voice actors sound like they had fun recording them. Musically, there is a decent mix of movie-ish themes and a good mix of game-specific music that stays thematically appropriate. A lot of the game will be spent in quiet, though, as much of the interstitial areas are silent aside from ambience – although it is decent.
Obviously, this is best played with a group of friends, but Return to Moria does have a fully fledged offline mode where the entire campaign can be enjoyed. In multiplayer, it is great fun to plan, mine and party together in the mines while progressing the campaign, and is a solid rival to games like Deep Rock Galactic.
