Return to Moria started out good, and as I stated in my first impressions post earlier this week I was enjoying it quite a bit. After playing it for a few more sessions and hours I can say that this game is lacking most of what makes an open world survival game fun. To be fair, calling it an open world game to begin with is a bit of a stretch. I'll explain why.
Restrictive and linear
When it comes to open world survival games there's, in my opinion, two things that are extremely important. It's the freedom of choice to explore and progress through the game the way you want to, then it's the open world that you can freely explore. Return to Moria doesn't feel like it has either. It feels like it's predetermined where you should build your bases and the game is more of a linear adventure game than an open world game.
Technically you can say that it's open world because you can walk wherever you like in the parts of the game that are accessible to you. In reality it's a linear game that blocks off your progress at certain parts until you've made a better pickaxe or something like that, and you're free to fully explore the small section you're currently in as you see fit.
This wouldn't be to bad if it you weren't constantly progressing away from your base. You build a base, get to a new part of the game and now need to run back and forth between your old and new base to move all your things between them. Repeat this for every new section of the game. It becomes old and stale really quickly.
The parts where you get to explore, mine and uncover the secrets of Moria are really fun. It's just a shame that they littered the game with a ton of tediousness so that it's long between the fun parts. It's a real shame because I was really enjoying the game for the first few hours.
The video below pretty much sums up how my mood went from good to bad with this game. I start out the video in a good mood and enjoying the game and towards the end there's just no energy and enjoyment left once I've discovered the sad reality of the game.
https://youtube.com/live/oW_2ONKKPSA?feature=share
Oh, well. Luckily I got this game for free from Epic Games so i didn't waste any money on this disappointment. We move on to new games. There's plenty more to explore.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.