The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria review – Cook, adventure, mine, repeat!

When Return to Moria was announced in June of 2023 with a trailer featuring the iconic John Rhys-Davies, I got so excited. A dwarf led Lord of the Rings game mixing adventure with survival crafting in the Mines of Moria? Sign me up. Well, after a stint on PC only, we now have crossplay multiplayer for consoles and PC. Now everyone can join in on the fun of Moria.

I played the game on Xbox and did not play the earlier release of the game on PC, so my initial reaction is just based on the current Xbox release of the game as well as the multiplayer I played with our Editor in Chief, Ron, and Laura who both played on PC.

You can play Return to Moria solo or with a crew. I want to first discuss playing solo, then we’ll discuss the multiplayer aspect of the game!

Solo Adventure

The first world I created was solo and offline. After a fun introduction cutscene featuring the amazing John Rhys-Davies as Gimli, your character is thrust into action as they fall into the area that will eventually lead to Moria. You begin the game by learning the simple stuff like crafting torches, pick axes, and quick build abilities. Return to Moria does a great job of not giving you more than you can handle at one time. They give you bits and pieces and have you use them before graduating you to the next task. While this is amazing for first time players, you’ll figure it out quickly and by the second playthrough you’ll probably be ahead of the tutorial by step two.

I made the mistake my first time of rushing through things because I was so entranced by the lore and story elements of Return to Moria and forgot that it’s a survival crafting game where you need to upgrade your supplies as you go. So I ran my dwarf butt through every little area extremely quickly and got my butt kicked so fast it made me realize after about four hours that I needed to reevaluate how I was playing the game. So, attempt two incoming.

The second time, I took it slow and really worked to explore every area I came to fully, mining every ore vein, exploring every abandoned building, and fighting every monster that came in my path. I started to build up my base and made myself a cozy little nook for staging my next moves. As I continued with this world, I realized this was indeed how this game was meant to be played solo. Making sure you have all the items you need before moving on to the next one. While it takes more time, it’s worth it as you move forward and you’re not getting killed every 30-seconds or so.

Combat is not easy in Return to Moria but it’s not Dark Souls either. By yourself, it feels like a medium to hard game as you simply have so many enemies in bigger areas that you can feel swarmed very easily. This changes a ton in multiplayer.

Multiplayer Adventure

As I mentioned before, I brought along Ron and Laura Burke on my first multiplayer adventure to see the differences between solo and multiplayer. And WOO! Return to Moria picks up fast with more than one player. Everything in the experience seems easier from crafting items for your base to fighting monsters, everything moves faster. We each had a little job in the morning as Laura was the organizer of the base, Ron cleaned out the monsters that spawned overnight, and I would get the breakfast going. Each day we would set out on a new exploration objective, whether that was to gain ore needed for crafting, or to go into a previously unexplored area. It was fun getting to explore all these areas with friends, and it becomes even better when you include the singing.

There are multiple moments where your characters talk or sing with each other. Playing alone, you sometimes feel bad for your character as they’ll say something out loud like they should be talking to someone, while nobody is there. Once you get another person there, the conversation becomes two-way and it seems much more fun than sad. But the SINGING. THE SINGING. As you mine, your characters can sing together mining songs. There are even fun harmonies in some of the songs. It’s very similar in vibes to the Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag shanties that your crew can sing as you sail. The other one we’ve found so far is drinking ale will allow your characters to dance and sing bar songs together. These moments are so cute and sweet to behold.

The Game Itself

I tend to get overwhelmed in survival crafting games such as these. Ark, Minecraft, etc always have me on edge because of the survival aspects. I already have trouble remembering to eat in real life, it’s an ever bigger stress having to remember in the games. However, Return to Moria does such an excellent job teaching you as you go, that I never felt overwhelmed or stressed to remember anything. It really just felt natural, especially in the second playthrough and during multiplayer.

While the basics are so well done, some of the moments further down the line area not explained as well. My biggest moment of this was the Black Diamonds. Black Diamonds are used to craft special items, but the thing you’ll probably use them for earlier in the game is crafting fast travel spots between your bases. There wasn’t a moment I was told how to get these items, and ended up finding one by accident because I found one during a raid on one of my bases. After doing a quick Google search, I found that Black Diamonds CAN drop from raids, bosses, or from Goblin Chests. I also learned that you can stop groups of enemies from spawning by taking out their lantern and opening the chest.

These moments never got me stressed, but the game does become so much easier when you’re not fighting the same enemies every morning on your way to the next area you’re wanting to explore.

Return to Moria is beautiful to behold if not a little glitchy at times. Walking through the halls and different underground towns are spooky if not magnificent. Meanwhile, the moments of opening the Eleven Grove and the Mines of Moria for the first time are simply breathtaking. For a survival crafting game, the graphics were so much nicer than I was expecting. I did run into some small graphical issues though. In some of the ore veins, sometimes small pieces of ore don’t break all the way leading to your character getting stuck in the vein until you can either roll your way out or somehow hit the piece that you’re stuck on at that time. We also had a crash during our multiplayer playthrough, but it was only once during the three hours we played and we only lost about five minutes of gameplay.

Crafting is insanely simple in Return to Moria as any item that’s within the range of your Hearth (the main base area) can be used even while in a chest. So if you make a pallet with wood, that wood can be used anywhere within range of that Hearth. From there, you either go to the crafting menu or the forge-type areas and choose what you want to build and it just pops up. This makes everything extremely easy in multiplayer as you’re not ever waiting for your friend to drop the ore before you can make the items you need for the day.

The character creation is top notch as you have multiple choices for almost every aspect of your dwarf. From body shape to beard type, you get to make your dwarf look any way you want before jumping into an adventure. There are also multiple character voices to choose from, which I enjoyed. You can also make more than one character, so you can use different characters, if you want, between worlds.

For those of you who are big Lord of the Rings lore fans, there are little easter eggs and references all over the place. From runes inscribed by Gandalf to lore drops from characters referencing something from the Dwarven past, there is always something to find while exploring the mines.

After going through multiplayer with Ron and Laura, I asked what the biggest difference between the earlier release and this release. Their response was basically that everything works so much smoother and a lot of the small things people had issues with earlier have been fixed up.

Return to Moria is a fun time exploring solo, but the game comes alive with friends. I would suggest this for any Lord of the Rings fan who enjoys Survival Crafting or goofing around in the world with friends.

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