Everyone knows what dwarves are good at, and it’s mining. They live in caverns deep beneath the surface of the earth and love it there, digging out treasures that no other race could ever hope to claim. Put a pick in one hand and beer in the other and you’ve got a happy dwarf, but there’s more going on underneath their stocky surfaces than the typical gruff but overall good-natured attitude would indicate. Dwarves tend to be driven by a sense of history, and when that’s coupled with the kind of stubbornness that could be a role model for donkeys you get situations like Moria. While the colony was destroyed because the dwarves dug too greedily and too deep, it was theirs once, and now that the Balrog is dead Gimli wants it back.
Drums in the Deep, But Also Treasures
This may not be a great idea, but then again there’s no way to tell without trying. As a player-created member of Gimli’s band, you end up trapped and alone in after a cave in at the locked entryway, and teaming back up with the group will require a little more effort than simply beating on the orcs, goblins, and wolves that have taken over the ruins of a dwarven civilization. Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria is an adventure/exploration game with a good amount of combat, but the lost dwarf didn’t land in the caves with anything like enough equipment to survive there. They’ll need to build better tools, and seeing as Moria has been completely picked over by its current residents, that’s going to require a base to craft everything from.
Pocket Power: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Or rather, several bases, because returning to the same one simply won’t work in caverns this size. Soon enough a whole company of dwarves joins the quest, and allies need to be taken care of as well. There’s a fair amount of systems at play to keep everything running, including building, crafting, combat, and gardening, and the adventure through the procedurally generated caverns includes as much of Tolkein’s lore as could be crammed into every nook and cranny. This includes the dwarves breaking into song while more repetitive work like mining is being done, and there are even special buffs for eating the right meals at the right time of day. you’re able to begin your day with a steak, sure, but a dwarf wants to kick off the morning with something more breakfast-y like a cranberry pie.
Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria initially came out a year ago on the Epic Game Store and a few months later on PS5, and the reviews were unfortunately sub-optimal. Since that time, though, a few updates have worked on addressing the game’s issues and today’s Steam and Xbox release comes with the biggest one yet, The Golden Update. This includes a number of features including a quest-free Sandbox mode, cross-platform play among all storefronts, plenty of new weapons, armor, and building parts, not to mention a proper pause function for single-player mode. It’s not an entirely new game but rather an improved one, although having never played it before yesterday I can’t really say how it compares to the previous version. I can say I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played despite a few noticeable bugs, like a wolf that got stuck climbing a statue or a staircase that procedurally generated itself right into a wall, but it’s strongly feeling like one of those games where the experience is so incredibly likable and filled with personality that it’s easy to overlook these things. Moria is filled with secrets and treasures, monsters and ruins, and if the occasional bug goes skittering through the experience it’s unlikely to overcome the pull of the dwarven mines.
