I was very hesitant about Return to Moria ("RtM") because I was so certain that it would be a lazy tie in game; relying on the player loving the setting so they overlook the weak gameplay (something you see so often in the Warhammer 40K tie-in games).

Still, I really enjoy survival crafter games and I love Lord of the Rings - particularly the undercooked Dwarven lore - so I dived in; I did not regret it. I am pleased to say that this is actually a really satisfying crafter game first that has a wonderful LOTR skin painted over it.

The mining is so enjoyable and they absolutely nailed the secret to making the repetitive grind fun; your character sings dwarven mining songs whilst they carve out new caverns in the wall faces. The sense of progression is also very well implemented and you'll be mining that ore to craft a better pickaxe to mine better ore!

Combat is not revolutionary but it is fun and doesn't feel tacked on. There are a variety of weapons (not many enemies but I don't mind that as it is lore accurate) and the game uses a very thematic armour system that also feels really good. In short, your character can become a solid warrior in his small metal box and you feel invincible! Until you then run into some poison or shadow wells that deal health damage and suddenly you feel like the little fleshy dwarf that you are underneath. It is a well implemented mechanic.

Such a small thing but the game comes with auto-crafting material containers as standard and it is such a fantastic quality of life feature that all survival crafters should have. I know it is not realistic to have materials magically teleport from your storage to the smelter etc but its a game, some of the silly busywork can be cut out! (For clairty: auto-pulling means that if you put your loot in a container within the zone of your base, then any crafting station you use in the base will be able to take materials from those containers. You don't have to learn the recipe, run around the base picking up all the necessary items before then using the station: simply interact with the crafter and it will tell you exactly what you can craft and then make it for you without ever needing to do the run around first.

The game does have some negatives but none are major at all so I shall just bullet point them:
- There are lots of different meals but they have no extra effects UNLESS you eat the "right" meal at the "right" time of day. This is very clunky to me though because you can't pick and choose the buff you might want. For example, if you want the health regen buff, you best hope that you are eating a meal at lunch time otherwise you just cannot get it (the eating times are breakfast, lunch and dinner). That said, the game does play more on drinking ales and they do serve specific purposes. It also gives you lots of ways to drink ale and that is a nice addition.
- The building mechanic can be a little clunky and there are much better building systems out there. It is serviceable and the visuals are awesome but the actual building system often feels like it is fighting against you.
- The horde mechanic gets old real quick. Please let me build barricades or something that stops these orc bastards just running through my kitchen.

Overall though, this game is a really good time. If you like survival crafters then it has enough new ideas to feel like it merits a place in the genre and if you like Lord of the Rings dwarves then it is just a fun time to run around Moria and see an interpretation of the great mansion.

It's... ok? Some baffling design choices and boring game loop decisions coupled with underwhelming armor, weapons and food mechanics make it feel underbaked:

- All buildables, including decorative items, can only be place at 90 degree angles. So decoratives all look weird since the are EXACTLY parallel or perpendicular to each other.
- Building walls, floors, etc is strange. They sort of snap but then you scroll wheel to move them around. Why? Building mechanics are so much better in games that have been out for years now.
- No indication of what different foods do - how much health, stamina, etc they provide.
- There are different foods for different times of day but it makes very little difference to the overall effect which one you eat.
- There's a light/dark mechanic too but it's hard to tell what effect it has on you.
- Clunky build and demolish UI. Instead of consistently having a single key (right-click, for instance) to back out of build-related menu's, you switch between B, C, right-click and esc.
- Little to no combat challenge.
- A LOT of walking.
- Really skimpy on building resources. You can get tons of wood scrap, mushrooms, cloth scraps - all items you don't need much of - but stone? That's limited to only being minable from nodes and the very occasional drop. There's no option to grind out building materials if you want to make really cool bases.
- New Weapons and armor aren't really much more than a higher armor rating and new visuals. There's very little info on what your weapons actually do and how much better your armor is.
- Nothing catches on fire. Goblins walking through your hearth. No problem. Wanna stand on your campfire? Go for it.
- Notifications pop up on your UI telling you that you got... something? There's no indication outside of the name of the item (swift, starving, etc.) as to what that actually causes.
- There are statues around the give you blessings. No indication what that actually does for you. We've noticed zero benefit.
- Weird food making mechanic where you can only make food and leave it on tables as opposed to picking it up.
- No water animations or effects. Fall into a river? You magically teleport out of it and take damage.
- There seems to be only one damage type, thus the lackluster weapons and armor.
- The map is maddening. There's an arrow for each player that is gigantic when compared to the actual size of the player making it confusing to tell where on the map you actually are. The map also shows areas as wide open when, in actuality, they are walled-off with pillars and doorways.
- Mobs of different types don't aggro each other. Shoot a deer mob next to some goblins and only the deer aggro and the goblins do nothing.
- Mobs respawn too much. Since they aggro to you yet they are trivial to kill, they just become annoying.
- When you get to the first elven area, in the part that is barricaded that everyone has to climb over, when you look up there's a terrain bug that lets you see through one of the terrain meshes. Perplexing that this is still in there this long after launch.
- There seems to be only one song when mining, just with slightly different lyrics, so the singing becomes annoying pretty quick.
- No terrain deformation - in a mining game - let that sink in.
- Played the game for many hours now and seem to have every single crafting station and I still can't make fiber for the rope ladder scaffolding which was one of the first buildables in the game. This seems like something is wrong if I, a survival game veteran, can't find that basic a recipe, pickable - whatever fiber is.

This game is basically a very stripped down Valheim with a little LOTR lore peppered on top. It's fun for a little while, at least until the next Valheim update.

The game starts with good exploration aspects. It has some bugs, but they are mostly forgiveable.

After you've made it through the first area however, you discover that it's just repetition beyond that - the rooms are identical, there are no new enemy types, the equipment is just the same but level 2, level 3, etc of the same...there's not much creativity.

We got about halfway through the game and just sort of gave up... there just doesn't feel like there's anything new to look forward to.