This is my first actual Game Review via my website's blog, and so it'll probably be very rambly and not formatted the best... but I'll work on that over time. I just wanted to get this out there while my thoughts are clear. Perhaps don't even call it a review... just a Stream of Consciousness and Reflection on my part!
(Note: Review updated after main-story completion at 53 hours!)
In this review I'll be going over the Good, the Bad (Mid), and the Ugly (Terrible) of the new Epic Games exclusive, "Return to Moria", including my thoughts on what could be improved or added in the future.
Set in the Lord of the Rings universe, this somewhat open world (mine?) game is part Adventure , part Survival Crafting, with simpler Souls-like combat thrown in.
But does it work? Is it any good? Is it going to be around for a long time? I played 53 hours to find out!
Please note there will be SPOILERS here, so proceed at your own risk.
Introduction: The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) universe is vast. And I mean V.A.S.T. So to go into detail in this review would be a fool's errand, so all I'll say is that for those who are somewhat familiar with LOTR, Return to Moria is set in the Fourth Age of Middle-earth, when the Dwarven people are returning to the Mines of Moria to reclaim what was lost to them and rebuild their home in the colossal mountain. Needless to say this doesn't go very well, when in the game's introduction the player character falls down a chasm into the depths of the mine, unable to be rescued directly by the other Dwarves above. This is where your deep-delving adventure begins!
The Basics (Dwarfing Around and Finding Out!) The game starts off right after you fall to your possible demise and having to find your way deeper into Moria to escape (it makes sense, trust me on this!). So you do what any Dwarf worth their salt does... you go mining! Well, after a little bit of tutorial hand-holding, that takes you over the absolute basics of Survival, Scavenging, and Crafting, or course.
The no-spoiler version of this is that you will have to work your way through Moria's depths, through a variety of biomes, until you... escape? As I said, I haven't completed the game, so I don't really know the ultimate outcome, but the developers have said it should take around 40 to 60 hours to complete, so that suggests there is an actual end point, at least in the main story-line. After that, I assume it just lets you continue to roam around to your heart's content.
I've spent my first 30 hours getting to The Deeps, which from what I have read is the second of around five major areas. It is at this point I'm currently building a new encampment, and trying to push the story forward.
Update: I played a further 24 hours of the game, completing the main-story until the credits rolled. I missed some Runes and Recipes I believe, but nothing that stops progression or any huge chunks of content. After the credits it puts you right back into the mine so you can keep exploring, building, and crafting.
So, my thoughts on the game upon completion!
The Good
- Aesthetics
The game looks nice, in my opinion. It isn't a AAA game, so it isn't perfect, but it isn't anything to sneeze at. The environments are well-rendered, and I'd love to get some photo-mode type shots (if there was one) of some of the areas I've encountered.
The weapons and amour you can get for your Dwarf look LOTR appropriate, with nothing too fancy or over the top. The neat thing I liked was getting the Orc Slayer enchantment, which makes your weapon light up like Sting in their presence (though, to be honest, you do kind of see their chatter subtitles before noticing the light on the weapon!).
- The "Vibes"
Its Dwarven AF. From every piece of movie and game footage of a Dwarven Mine... this has it. A ruined underground city complete with a gigantic mine, and then sprawling cave systems underneath.
The lighting, bones, and vermin that infest it gives off a sufficiently creepy vibe due to it being abandoned for so long, but if it was inhabited I can see that it would be so much more alive, clean, and well lived-in.
- Exploration
The Mines of Moria are pretty damn big, but not "too big". This is good because you get to explore a variety of large environments over the course of the game, however the downside is that there isn't too much to do in those environments, but not a downside that downgrades it to a Bad thing.
One thing I wasn't expecting was the verticality of some areas, which I should have been knowing what mines are! I'd go into an area and think, "Huh, this looks... fine...", and then standing on the edge of a cliff to see that the area extends FAR below what I initially saw.
The Bad (More Mid than Bad, take with a grain of salt!) - Combat It is very basic. This isn't a bad thing, but it also doesn't make the game shine. You have the following moves: Swing, Block, and Dodge Roll. Then in combination to that you have a Hold Swing ability with each weapon, and a Shield-Shove if you Swing while Blocking. You can essentially cheese 90% of basic monster encounters by shoving and then stabbing them when they're down. There is no Counter move, and no Magic. You can Enchant your weapons, but they don't seem too useful, so I just take the "More damage against Orcs" because, heck, 90% of the enemies are Orcs and Goblins! - Hunger My Dwarf is ALWAYS hungry. The hunger bar goes down steadily as you do things, but also it looks like Fast Travel takes off about 1/3 of your hunger bar, sleeping takes off about 1/2, and I can't sleep if I'm at low hunger... so I have to cook a meal to even sleep, which wastes a lot of resources. I get why it's in here, but it drains so fast that you'll start taking damage from being hungry so often.
- Sieges and Hordes Sieges are when, for some reason, Orcs and Goblins spawn near your base and just start bashing at it. They're short and easy to repel, but don't give you anything for your trouble aside from some Cloth Scraps and Metal Fragments. They don't even seem to drop the Black Diamonds you need for important things later on. Hordes seem to happen when you've been in Darkness for too long, get the Despair debuff, and then you'll just be swarmed by Orcs and Goblins. This, while dangerous, feels counter-intuitive because you're already probably on low health and trying to get back to your encampment... and you then just get ambushed by too many creatures. They drop Coins, which can build you a nice Treasure Trove, but I don't think that alone is worth it. - The Creature A.I. They're all dumb as stumps. They have Melee Attack, Ranged Attack, and Stand there Pointing Menacingly at you. They can't go through small gaps you mine through dirt, they can't climb onto ledges, and from my experience... can't even climb RAMPS made specifically for them in their own camps. Clearing out an Orc Encampment made easy is just standing on the broken pillar you use to get in (because the gates don't open and you can't break them!), and shooting them with Arrows/Bolts until you've cleared the majority of them, and then go melee to mop up the dregs.
Update after completion: While in the last area of the game I found the easiest way to clear them out was run in, destroy the Orc Banners, fast travel away, fast travel back... and they all despawn. However, this does mean you miss out on valuable resources, so do it at your own detriment!
- Collectables There aren't many, which is a shame, because in a mine-exploration game you'd expect a lot. From what I've found so far the only collectables are Ranger Diary Entries (which give you just a bit of lore when you combine them at an abandoned ranger camp), or the Muznakan Carvings (little statues you place in specific areas to get loot). These are the only two things I've found, and they're not very exciting.
- The Crafting
Crafting is recipe based rather than skill-tree based. You gain recipes by finding crafting resources out in the wild, repairing Dwarven Statues, and fully completing a Muznakan Carving Set for a Dwarven Lineage and looting them from the reward chest.
The actual downside to this is that you can't be like, "I want to focus on Building while my friend does Exploration!", it just doesn't work like that.
The second downside is that you tend to get recipes way in advance of when you can craft them. For example, I need something called Resin. I found the recipe probably within hours 15 to 20, and by hour 30 I've still not seen a single Resin Vein (because yes, it's mined, not gathered from trees like other games).
- Mining (I KNOW, RIGHT!?)
So, it's not terrible. It's basic. Stone and Ore veins are in the walls, and you mine them out... and that's about it. There aren't any secrets behind ore veins, you can't discover more precious ores in the same vein, and what gems you can find are limited by the type of vein it is, so there's no excitement to it really.
I'd love to be mining out a vein, only to break into a cavern long-lost to time that has special loot or events, but sadly that doesn't seem to be possible in Moria.
- Base Building
It is far too simple, and far too janky to be worth your time. Just throw up some stone walls, a door, and call it a GG.
I was really hoping for more. The main problem is that while the environment artists have done a bang-up job of the areas themselves, adding/repairing an area is a little tricky.
A lot of the time when you try to add structural pieces, they don't align or snap to the existing ones, and so end up insta-crumbling or not being very structurally sound, so adding pieces above them ends up being impossible.
This, coupled with there being a lack of cosmetic base building pieces, means that I lost motivation to bother other than making by base a box that stores materials and crafting stations.
- Solo Sadness
OK, so this is definitely my bad. I generally don't play games with other people, even ones that are meant to be done so.
I can definitely see that playing this with a group would make things so much easier. For example I'm the only one going out to find resources, while simultaneously trying to explore and push the story forward, defend from Sieges, and all that stuff.
If I had other Dwarves with me, things could be dived up to make a cleaner experience. As while there's no specialization per-player, you could totally have people being Miners and Gatherers while others go Exploring.
The Ugly (The ACTUALLY Bad!) - Loading Times (Fast Travel) This is the most egregious thing so far in the game, so that's a blessing! The load times are insane, even on an SSD drive. I'm assuming this will be something a patch can deal with at some point, but it gets so bad that they can take around 5 minutes, and sometimes I've fast-traveled to avoid combat, only to wake up dead at my destination with my gear back at the earlier fast travel point. - Chunk Loading (The infamous Dot Walls) Again, something I assume is going to be fixed and patched out. I believe this is because the mine environments are so big that it kind of loads and unloads the areas to save memory (I'm not technical, I'm just guessing!), and so when you go back to a previous chunk it has to re-load it. - Exhaustion This is the actual mechanic that has annoyed me the most since I started playing. Sure, Dwarves get tired just like us Humans, but it happens so fast that it's brutal, and by the time I've woken up and fast-traveled I'm already down a block of Stamina (because tiredness takes away stamina chunks the wearier you get). And then just seems to go down real fast before I've even progressed to a new room. - It isn't a FULL Survival Crafting Game. An Adventure Game in Sheep's Clothing. This is the "Big Sad" of Return to Moria. It kind of has an end. Sure, you can probably just continue rolling around the place, building up Dwarven Strongholds in multiple areas... but why would you? Once you've explored an area only certain crops respawn, Ore Veins and Monsters don't outside of random patrols, and there are no Events or Vignettes that happen randomly in any of the areas I've explored. This, coupled with the base building aspect of the game being very lackluster, doesn't make me want to spend time on that aspect. All I'm concerned with is that I have enough resources to push the main story to its conclusion.
Thoughts on the future of Return to Moria
I'm not a Game Designer. I've taken a few courses, designed things on paper, but I've never been employed as one... but I've played enough Survival and Adventure games to have thoughts on what could be improved to make this experience feel even better. The developers have said they at least plan to support the game for a year after launch, and have released the info on their December patch... which is great! For more info CLICK HERE.
Now, for my thoughts on where it could go from here.
- Aesthetics
I love how the game looks, but there are two things I'd love to see.
1. The ability to use the different Weapon and Armour appearances on your max-level gear. You can dye your gear, but I'd be happy to have my Durin's Armour appearance over my Mythril Armour.
2. Dwarf appearance from character creator fully working in-game. I say this because while my facial features appear correct in-game, the body type just goes to default. Not sure if this is a bug or not, but I can see the difference.
- Exploration and Discovery
While I enjoyed the size of the game's areas, there wasn't too much to do in them, and eventually you will start to see a lot of repeated tiles. This was expected, and does make sense from a recognition perspective... but it does get a little samey.
For example, aside from transitional areas between the main areas, such as the Crystal Descent and the Upper Armories of Third Deep (which are both cool, but you spend about 5 minutes in), you'll find a lot of the room tiles are duplicated with some variation of things in them.
One thing that stuck out to me was that they made some AMAZING zones... that you pass through once or twice. I'd have enjoyed spending more time in those zones if there was more to do there, like the Upper Armories of Third Deep, or even the early Elven Quarter.
I would have loved to see "events" or "rare" things happen every so often. The only real threat in most areas is the possibility of an Orc Camp, or other creature spawns like Drakes or Trolls, and even then you can destroy the Orc Banner and they won't respawn. Things like named-monsters in certain areas, special events like waves of enemies, or even just finding rare relics that you have to fight to get to.
- Collectables It would be great to be able to find special display-items to place in your encampments. For example, Orc Skulls, Special Gems, Dwarven Relics, etc.
You can already make Wall Mounts for your Masterwork Items, so it would be a nice touch to be able to display other fun things in your base.
- Building This is probably the most undercooked area of Return to Moria, and in my opinion one of the things that they need to iterate on to make the game really special.
Think of other games. For me, "7 Days to Die" jumps to mind because I've played so much of it, and half the fun there is either building your own base from the ground up, or finding one of their points of interest and rebuilding it to be an awesome base. You can't really do this in Moria.
As the game takes place in such a confined area, there isn't much buildable space to make your own base from scratch. This means a lot of the time you'll have to make your makeshift encampments in existing buildings... but that's not easy because of the basic building options. The pieces you can build don't really snap to the existing terrain well, if at all, and due to the weird lode-bearing system, it isn't easy to do things like make multiple floored structures without building in an existing one. Even then due to the lode system it becomes hit or miss.
- End Game Content
This is my final hope for the game, that something comes along after you roll-credits. I have two things that I think would open up so much possibility for Return to Moria, and make it the stand-out Survival Adventure game of the past few years.
1. More Stories, Quests, and Adventures
I enjoyed the main story, it was a pretty chill ride through the Mines to slay a Dragon and re-open the mines for the Dwarven people! But I'd love more, right? Who wouldn't!
Of course, as Moria is no longer inhabited by Dwarves when the game starts, you can't just have Quest NPCs all over... but you can have other things. Like finding notes on hidden treasures or areas, or after the credits roll Dwarves start returning to the different zones and START giving out certain quests, like restoring areas of the mines, finding specific resources, etc.
2. Infinite Delves The Deepest Depths are good for resources... but that's about it, and prove more an annoyance than anything truly profound. I fought one demon-like monster and some spiders down there and it just felt dissatisfying.
What if the game just made more areas? The final area of the game is Barazinbar, but what if it wasn't? With the amount of generation the game has it looks like it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to add full areas, pulling together multiple tilesets, or hand-crafting zones that just take you deeper and deeper into the mountain. Add more bosses, more events, just make it worth playing after the credits.
Conclusion It may look like I've put a LOT more into the Bad and the Ugly than the Good, but overall I would recommend Return to Moria for those who REALLY like Lord of the Rings and its surrounding media (Books, Games, Movies, etc.). For those looking for a deep survival crafting game, this isn't it unfortunately... but in time it could be! Though that isn't to say I haven't had fun playing just to see how deep the mine goes, and had a great time checking it out!
From what I have played in my 54 hours, there doesn't seem to be enough to keep people motivated enough to continue playing after reaching the game's conclusion. It doesn't feel to me as if there's enough building-pieces to make complex strongholds, and I haven't seen any replay-value to any of the areas you clear out, so you're just pushing through the mines until the story conclusion.
Perhaps in the future there may be reason to do so, but unless they do things to address the Bad and the Ugly above, I don't see myself re-playing the game from the beginning a second time unless it was with friends who wanted to give it a shot.
I hope that you found this review useful, and that if you do play Return to Moria you have a fun time... I know I did!
Comments