The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™

Boring and tedious. This game definitely had potential to be a great survival game but unfortunately what it IS, is a waste of time. The core gameplay loop involves gathering resources, establishing a base/camp, crafting new gear, venturing into the next area and fighting orcs -> repeat until you reach the end. The combat is very clunky and unsatisfying. When you're fighting multiple enemies you tend to get locked onto a random target in front of you and then slide at them like you're using commando in MW2. Enemies have very inconsistent respawn timers and can at times spawn right in front of you. There's very little meaningful variety in the weapons you can wield, all of them behave more or less the same. There's no classes or different combat roles, you run at the enemy, spam heavy attacks and block if you have a shield. Or you could use a bow and spam arrows at a distance instead. If you ask me, the bow is best suited for destroying certain environmental hazards and killing flying enemies because how little damage it deals to anything you could fight with a melee weapon. Exploration and base building are the game's strong points. The environments in the game are certainly pretty to look at but there didn't seem to be much point in exploring once you had the minimum required resources to move to the next zone. I imagine you can build some cool bases in this but when every other aspect of the game is lacking, what's the point of building anything cool? I'll rather go and play a game that has good base building AND is fun to play or gives me unrestricted creativity if building is the sole focus. I also cannot be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to go gather a bunch of resources in this game to build a massive base because how soul wrenchingly slow and janky it is to gather anything. There's also a day/night cycle in the game, which doesn't really make sense, you're in a mountain... It felt like it was constantly dark and cold (due to it being "night time"), meaning exploration would be all the more painful. This system doesn't need to exist and feels like the devs were desperate to add things into their game to make it seem like there's depth to it. To make things worse to skip time and get back your stamina, everyone needs to be sleeping at the same time. This is a problem unless all the players stick together at all times, because when someone is exploring far away and others are gathering resources or fighting enemies, you need to wait for the explorer to either make a camp (which requires certain resources you might not be able to find or even mine at the time of need) or come all the way back to base while everyone else just sits alt-tabbed watching YouTube. WHY THE HELL DID YOU NOT MAKE IT SO THAT EVERYONE CAN REST INDEPENDENTLY TO REGAIN STAMINA, LIKE EVERY OTHER SURVIVAL GAME?!? And why does it cost coal to make a small campfire instead of just wood when the whole point of the small campfire is to establish a small camp while out exploring? The survival aspect of this game boils down to plate spinning, i.e. keeping your food bar filled for the sake of it. It's not a gradient where hunger gradually makes you weaker with different debuffs nor is there much of a reason to cook some of the more demanding recipes, you may as well just cook the bare minimum to get your health back and then eat dust from the ground to keep the hunger bar filled. It's also completely arbitrary that cooked food spoils (very quickly too) but raw ingredients (which you can still eat and find plenty of) do not. For some reason you also cannot have multiple dishes on a dining table at the same time. The level design has been irritating to navigate if anything due to there being no easy way to go up and down. You can build rope ladders but the ladder is pre-attached to a platform and is very short, meaning you need to build a super janky daisy chain of jagged platforms OR you use quick platforms without the rope ladder to do the exact same thing but with a higher frequency. Both of these methods end up making the environment look hideous with riddled platforms like it's a Rust server that's three months deep into a wipe... This game is a solid 3/10, it is devoid of passion and care. Simply not worth your money or time.