The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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A survival crafting adventure set in the Fourth Age of Middle-earth. Lead the Dwarves to reclaim Moria - mine, build, and battle through procedurally generated depths alone or with up to 8 players in co-op. It is time to return to Moria!
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is a open world survival craft, base-building and dwarf game
developed by Free Range Games
and published by North Beach Games.
Released on August 27th 2024 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese - Brazil and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 8,244 reviews of which 6,840 were positive and 1,404 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.1 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 14.49€ on Steam with a 50% discount, but you can find it for less on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ through various videos and screenshots.
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit
- Processor: Intel® Core i5 (Quad Core or better)
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060
- DirectX: Version 12
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 20 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Recommended
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
First off, if the reviewer has less than 20 hours, might be best to ignore them. They complain about broken mechanics and it simply isn't true. You are weak when you start. As you progress you get better armor, weapons, food, storage, abilities, brews, meals, lighting, special abilities, buffs and so on. Sure, you start off with a stick and no armor. All games are like that. People that want easy mode in 20 hours are just plain missing the point. The first two hours or so are slow and the tutorial to help you understand how this game is different from others. Mine the coal, don't pass it up. Pick up everything. Hoard everything, you will need it all...eventually. Those cloth scraps you toss away cause you have 1,000. You will eat them up fast when you need a certain kind of higher level cloth. This game is Deep, and it goes deep. As you unlock something, build it. That is how you progress. Set up bases deeper and deeper in (and down). The mechanics are really good, quite polished. The story is awesome. This is best played with a friend. Make everything... did I mention MAKE EVERYTHING.. trust me, the thing you didn't make unlocked the thing you wanted. The game isn't broken, I have ALL achievements. MAKE EVERYTHING. (all armor, all weapons, all brews, all masterworks...) 150 hours in and still stuff to do. I want to get the DLC but everything indicates it had game breaking bugs at the moment. When they get that sorted out I will try it out as the concept is amazing. 200+ Hours in: Decided to get the Durin's Folk DLC. Loved it. Adds a new dimension to the game bringing other dwarves into your company. They have patched major bugs so it's very much playable. The dwarves can get stuck if you put their beds or the things they interact with too close together, just give them some additional space to access their chest or bed and that part works fine. If you can't find them, reset them at the delve stone and they come back. If all else fails reboot the game and everything is good. Had to reboot maybe 3 times total. Really nothing game breaking. On to the review. Salvagers are epic, they also take care of the crops. You will want these for sure. Cook - will take care of feeding the extra dwarves you add (no you), good to have one. Builders - will get your monuments going, I recommend several. Guards - with good armor will farm mats dropped from the attackers. This is the best source of Gundabar slag aside from expeditions. Mason - fix stuff, not really valuable at this time Miners - only mine areas that are not completely mined out, have to protect them, have to build a delve stone close to where they are mining and the ability to eat and sleep close. In the current state, they are not worth the trouble especially once you open up expeditions. Artisans, Blacksmiths and such will be needed to make make goods for the traders so you can build reputation with them and purchase materials you can't mine or make. These are needed to build your monuments which are needed to upgrade your delve stone. Its pretty well done, hoping for more. Would love more missions and expeditions to completely rebuild Moria. Great game, will probably run a 2nd play through soon.
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Return to Moria is a strange, uneven, and oddly sincere game. I mean that as a compliment. At its best, it nails something that’s harder than it looks. It makes Moria feel like a place again. Not a backdrop. Not a dungeon you sprint through for loot. A place with weight, history, and danger baked into the stone. You’re not conquering Moria. You’re surviving it, one torch, one tunnel, one bad decision at a time. Co-op is where the game really comes alive. Playing with friends turns the whole experience into an actual expedition. Someone is mining. Someone is building. Someone is lost. Someone is yelling because they woke up something they shouldn’t have. Those moments feel genuinely dwarven in spirit. Shared labor, shared panic, shared triumph. When things go wrong, and they will, it feels earned instead of cheap. Exploration is the soul of the game. Digging into the dark, reclaiming forgotten halls, stumbling into ancient ruins, all of it sells the fantasy. There’s a quiet tension to moving forward, knowing light and sound matter, knowing Moria does not forgive carelessness. When the atmosphere clicks, it clicks hard. This is one of the few Lord of the Rings games that understands restraint. It lets the setting breathe instead of shouting lore at you. Combat, unfortunately, is the weakest pillar holding the whole thing up. It works, technically, but it’s clunky. Animations feel stiff. Enemy behavior can be awkward. Fights sometimes feel like obstacles rather than encounters. You don’t feel like a legendary warrior. You feel like a stubborn dwarf swinging through molasses. That can be immersive in small doses, but over time it wears thin. There are also rough edges you can’t ignore. Bugs, jank, occasional confusion in progression. It sometimes feels like a game that needed more time in the forge. You can see the intent. You can feel the passion. You can also see where the hammer slipped. Still, I keep coming back to how it feels overall. This game understands that Moria is not about power fantasy. It’s about endurance. About reclaiming something that doesn’t want to be reclaimed. About the long grind of survival underground with only stone, song, and stubbornness to keep you going. If you play solo, it’s solid but flawed. If you play co-op, it becomes something else entirely. Messy, atmospheric, tense, and memorable in ways that polished games often fail to be. Return to Moria isn’t perfect. It’s not smooth. It’s not elegant. But it has soul, and that counts for more than people like to admit. In a landscape full of safe, focus-tested games, this one at least dares to feel heavy. And in Moria, heavy is exactly right.
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One of the best survival game I played, the only thing missing to this game imo is a skill tree so we can have different dwarfs specialised in different things like a cook, smith, gardener, tank, melee, range etc, that would be just perfect.
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Fun game. Keep in mind, as of me making this comment, there is a bug that can delete your world and character. DON'T QUIT TO DESKTOP DIRECTLY FROM WORLD! That's what I've seen is what causes it. Quit to title first, then desktop.
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First things first, I am recommending this game purely from the perspective of a LotR mega-fan. If I wasn't one, I unfortunately wouldn't recommend it to a general audience. My thumbs up is as a mega-fan, to other mega-fans. The devs clearly care about the universe, and I think future games could be genuinely good. This is the reason I felt the need to write this review- the Very Positive rating (at the time this was written) could be misleading to a general survival game audience. With that caveat out of the way, onto the actual review. The core idea of this game is fantastic! Unfortunately, the execution was sloppy due to the developers focusing too much on current trends in the genre, instead of building something that actually fits in with LotR. What I mean by this is the game is basically a mediocre survival-crafter at best, with a LotR paint job slapped on top of it. The paint job can be cool and shiny in some places (almost exclusively related to the lore/world building), and truly repulsive at it's worst (procedural generation of the map, progression, building, art style, combat, wait isn't that literally every aspect of a game?!?). As I write everything out, it is making me more begrudgingly give that thumbs up. I think my opinion of this game is a great example of how new media related to old and beloved IP's can really ride the coattails of the wonderful lore it was originally built upon. And that's my point with the caveat above, if this was some random new IP in a previously unknown universe, I would be telling you all to avoid this game like the plague. It was those little snippets of: actually standing in a massively significant location from the lore, conversing with the legendary Gimli son of Gloin, uncovering secrets about the Dark Lords and the long-lasting impacts of their actions on Middle Earth. Those hidden gems scratched that itch of learning something new about my favorite fantasy universe enough to recommend this game to others that have the same itch as me. With the positives out of the way (yikes, that's it?), I will address my issues with this game as a gamer, not a LotR fan. As a reference point it took me 47 hours to beat the main story line on normal difficulty, entirely alone. I didn't use any guides or videos except one because I couldn't for the life of me figure out where to find rubies. Didn't do any farming or brewing, my dwarf survived entirely on mushroom stew, salted meat, and abakhs through the whole playthrough (take that how you will). This is pretty much spoiler free. 1. Procedural World Generation: this is the biggest gripe I had with the game. Why the devs decided to hop on board with this trend I will never understand. Procedural generation, at its core, is used to make exploration more exciting and encourage subsequent play-throughs. The system in this game is so janky it completely misses in both of those areas. I lost interest in exploration by the fourth zone (from then on I just rushed through to find the items I needed to continue to the next one), and I am confident there is nothing new I could see or experience in a second play-through. Some of the transitions between zones or even areas within the same zone are downright jarring, and make zero sense from a lore perspective. The in-game map is nearly useless, you pretty much just have to rely on memory at a certain point. In my opinion, the map should have been handcrafted start to finish and I will die on that hill. 2. Progression: it was hard to decide if this should be #1 or #2. I went with #2 because an awesome map that is fun to explore will still give you the motivation to push through a not-so-awesome progression system (sadly this game had neither). The progression is bad. It is super repetitive... the formula is almost exactly the same in each zone: enter new zone > current gear is weak against enemies which are a slight variation on the previous zone's enemies > find new gear recipes by rebuilding statues while avoiding enemies at all cost > mine new ore needed in those recipes while avoiding enemies at all cost > sometimes find special forge to craft new gear, or just craft at base > become unstoppable once you have upgraded weapons > faceroll the zone and orc stronghold > complete main quest objective > move on to next zone. Rinse and repeat. It's all the same, the strongholds are all identical, rebuilding the forges is all the same, the zones look different but there's nothing unique about progressing through them, the few actual boss fights (not warchiefs) are decent but few and far between. Mining basically one node of each new material was enough for me to get fully kitted out, the hardest part was finding the recipes in the first place. Lastly, you quickly realize there is almost no incentive to building multiple bases, it is purely a waste of time progression-wise and not fun at all due to a bad building system (will get into that next). With the current progression system, you are much better off getting firmly dug in to one location and expanding as you progress. Just always bring materials to make a campfire, a map stone, and a repair smithy wherever you go and you're set. It just shouldn't be that way, it should feel like you're actually clearing out Khazad-dûm, and establishing your own strongholds as you go. 3. Building: building just straight up sucks. There are two key reasons for this in my opinion. First, you can't really "clean up" or rebuild areas completely. Oh, you like this area and want to build a base here? Sure, you can, but you're going to have to deal with these ruins that you can't clear for... reasons, and they will make your base look like a decrepit hovel no matter how much work you put into it. There are so many areas where you just... can't destroy or repair things... WHY? Second issue is the grid system. It sucks, it's super limiting, and the worst part is it doesn't even line up with the existing structures sometimes... again... WHY?? You can't put anything on an angle, so if you wanted to build in a cool area that isn't aligned with the grid- well that's too damn bad, find somewhere else or deal with everything you build looking horrifically out of place. 4. Art style/graphics : I'll keep this one short, my review is turning into a LotR novel of its own. Art style was a miss for me overall. The game looks okay-ish here and there, but in general just... bleh. Really starts to weigh on you by the last couple zones. A lot of lighting issues, textures just look off, feels like a game from the Xbox 360/PS3 era. I was running the game on a 4070 Super. 5. Combat: in comparison to other survival games, combat is pretty much on par. The spots where it stands out negatively are the lack of diversity and enemy AI. Long story short combat is basically bonk everything until it dies- there is very little variation needed in strategy. While there are different weapon types, they are all pretty much the same each tier. I played around with all the different types early on and found that it was best to just get whatever one you unlocked first in the next tier, put the extra orc damage rune on it, and move on. Once you get the crossbow it replaces the bow, end of story for ranged combat. Enemy AI is decent sometimes but also pretty janky. They just spawn out of thin air a lot- I don't mean when they come out of the ground or jump from the ceiling, I mean like straight up out of thin air in front of you. I cheesed every single warchief because their AI was so bad with pathing, I also found that you can easily cheese hordes. I know I chose to do that and exploit the weak AI, but I only did it because combat became such a slog towards the end of the game I wanted to avoid it as much as possible. If you made it this far, I hope my review was insightful in some way. Thanks for taking the time to read through it!
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Frequently Asked Questions
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is currently priced at 14.49€ on Steam.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is currently available at a 50% discount. You can purchase it for 14.49€ on Steam.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ received 6,840 positive votes out of a total of 8,244 achieving a rating of 8.08.
😎
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ was developed by Free Range Games and published by North Beach Games.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is playable and fully supported on Windows.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is not playable on MacOS.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is not playable on Linux.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ offers both single-player and multi-player modes.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ includes Co-op mode where you can team up with friends.
There are 8 DLCs available for The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™. Explore additional content available for The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ on Steam.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ does not support Steam Remote Play.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 27 January 2026 02:01 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 26 January 2026 04:15 |
| Steam price | 28 January 2026 20:52 |
| Steam reviews | 28 January 2026 13:55 |
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Game modes
Multiplayer
Features
Online players
1,030
Developer
Free Range Games
Publisher
North Beach Games
Release
27 Aug 2024
Platforms
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