Every now and then I run into a game that looks like it could be really cool and it has a lot of building in it which is something that normally appeals to me quite a lot. But then I start playing it for a while and quickly realize that this game seems as though it was designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse and to attempt to play it using a controller is an exercise in extreme patience with a ton of reading involved.
I enjoyed a bit of this game and it seemed like it had some promise but then I started getting flashbacks to V Rising which it is very similar to and I didn't even last as long as I did in that game, because the problems I have with this one are the same ones I had with this one.
Taking a beloved franchise like LoTR is always going to pique a lot of people's interest and honestly, I probably wouldn't have noticed this game at all had it not been part of the LoTR franchise.
You are a random dwarf in this game and you run around and collect various supplies such as stone, iron ore, cloth scraps, meat from enemy kills, wood from discarded furniture and many other things and then you have a base of sorts where you are supposed to turn these base items into ever-increasing supplies and more items for your base as time goes by.
The cycle continues like this in perpetuity and other than raids on your base, which I suppose could be fun, the game just consists of running around and looking for more and more supplies.
Combat is very basic and I can only presume that it gets more involved later. The issue I have with the combat being so basic (chop chop chop dodge, chop chop chop doge, over and over) is that it is exceptionally boring and feels clunky. It isn't fun and if you ever face two enemies at a time you are going to take damage.
The building of stuff if fun for a while until you realize that they have built in a rather lazy never-ending feature that you will always be needing to search for new materials and acquiring those materials simply mean more walking further and further from your base. If there is any sort of fast travel I never figured out what it was and I am not going to because the game is a slog-fest.
I suppose the idea here is to build some sort of epic base eventually but honestly, the time that is required to make any progress in this it just too much.
Also, there is a ton of reading to be done and this is where I feel the game was meant for someone that is sitting a few feet from their monitor and not on the other side of a room as console players like me tend to be doing. Frequently I had to stand up and move across the room in order to be able to read the 14 point font that explains what it is that you are supposed to do next. I guess it is my fault for having a TV that is a mere 50 inches.
I think the thing that irritated me the most is that if you have your mining pickaxe equipped, which is necessary to obtain materials or to dig holes to new areas, getting your weapon set equipped quickly when enemies pop out of nowhere isn't easy or if it is, this process was never explained in the tutorial - which is something that doesn't really exist in this game anyway.
In order to equip your weapons you have to go into your inventory and then individually equip them and during that time you have probably already taken several hits from the enemies that just appeared. In one instance I was nearly dead by the time I got my sword and shield in my hands.
Another big issue is storage: You cannot carry very much of any particular thing you find and your bag will fill up extremely fast. You cannot pick up anything else until you do the arduous walk back to your base and put them in a chest that you also built and even this process is extremely time-consuming and there is no feature to auto-drop certain item types.
I never got as far as to try to build something that I wasn't physically carrying so I don't know if you have to go back and forth to the storage chest in order to be physically holding the materials necessary to make the new hammer or whatever it is that is blocking your progression in the objectives that constantly change in the top right corner.
The map and navigation is not great either and the controls are convoluted as well. To me this appears to be a game that was meant to have you hovering over your inventory with a mouse and just like other games with inventory such as Path of Exile, navigation in said inventory is a massive pain in the ass using a controller. The button combinations that you have to use in order to get through this are complicated and honestly, too many to remember to keep me interested.
When you die, all your gear is at your corpse as well and this can necessitate a completely unnecessary walk to your body for retrieval.
Maybe this game gets good later on, but they did a very poor job of getting me enticed to play from the start and perhaps this is the reason why this was given away for free on the PS-Plus network in the first place.
I will not play this game anymore and cannot really recommend it to anyone playing with a console. It appears as though, just like with V Rising that it would be a passable game on a PC but I consider it rather the opposite of fun on a console.