I'm a dad with a more than full time job. I don't have time to play games and invest the time in understanding complex game mechanics. This game has hit the spot for me. I can pick it up any time and it's super fun playing casually. The last time I felt this way about a game was Helldivers 2. It's not too complex for me to invest too much brain power in when I have no more brain capacity at the end of the day. Highly recommend for any LOTR fan.

Honestly i'm just playing it to beat it out of spite, everything is an uphill battle the food system is ♥♥♥♥ the combat is buggy at best go to hit an enemy right in front of you and you fly to an enemy way behind it or in the opposite direction. I would hold off for another year or so until they fix the jank before playing

Let's get to it: If you're a big ol' Tolkien nerd, there's a lot in here for you. Heaps and heaps, mountains of little snippets, bits of dwarftalk, and a whack of singin' dwarf songs. You need one in your online session. Let them marvel at all the stuff that you come across and tell you excitedly what's going on.

If you're not a Tolkien nerd, such as myself*, it's a fine game. It upends a few of the usual craft/survival tropes. Some few are going to annoy some people like how you can only dig in certain spots of the map, and those digs are limited. This limitation makes a bit of sense in the context of Moria, or so my Tolkien nerd partymember (also my wife, who knows where I sleep) says. Even still, there's sort of a narrative to the events that unfold in the game, a story being told as you work your way through Moria, sometimes folding in and around other, previous narratives told in the books.

The game plays as journey, a key Tolkien trope. Rather than just digging in and making the one base, you steadily make your way through Moria, maybe making sub-bases along the way, or setting up your own teleport** stones to help cut the walking distance down. Dwarves got munchkin-cat legs, little stumpy things, they don't move around quite that fast. They're faster than you think, but none of them are about to be winning Olympic medals in sprints.

As for combat, the basic moves aren't complex, but there's some intricacy in how those are used. You have a few attacks that, when combined with enchantments, can help give you space in combat. That space is vital as most combats have you outnumbered and your health (and armour) does not regenerate on its own. Many of these attacks burn stamina so you need to use them intelligently as well. So my own tactics involve isolating individual opponents for quick punishment, and/or keeping opponents off the missus' back while she issues them tickets to board the pain train. Flailingly wildly leads to getting dunked on by orcs.

This is the only time I found the use of imperial units kind of charming. For the rest of the world, a "yard" is a discount meter (~90 cm really) and a "fathom" is two discount meters. I don't know why they couldn't use yards for fathoms, but they got rules. Fathoms only for depth, yards only for horizontal distances, and I have no clue why. Rules, maaan. But it's kind of rustic which suits the world.

You can build yourself up a base, if you wish, and you can do it pretty much anywhere. Though the game also provides some places hither and thither you can clean up and use, with a handful of equipment simply needing repairs. We settled down fairly early, making use of the teleport** stones to get around the map. You can place your own down whereever you will, and while they're spendy, uprooting them returns all the materials so it sort of doesn't matter.

Anyway, to close this off: it feels like a fine enough game. It punches above its weight with Tolkien lore, which has been keeping my wife the Tolkien nerd pretty happy and having her tell me all sorts of tidbits about this guy or that dwarf or what a frazakker*** plant really is. Combat tests a person--weapon reach is a big issue, as is situational awareness. This game also carries much more narrative than others of its ilk, and while it feels a little compressed, it also doesn't feel like its stretching out its content either.

We'll get through it yet, and we've been streaming our adventures. There's another couple weeks left, I expect. If you're still here with me, then you're exactly the sort of person I'd like to see. I'm at http://www.twitch.tv/fdejeuner, and heck, there's even a schedule. Hope to see you. And to conclude, some footnotes:

* I mean, I read Lord of the Rings when I was a teenager. Didn't see the movies. I have strong powers of recall, though, so I still recall various tidbits as I go along.

** I think they're called "map stones" or somesuch, and using them makes your li'l dwarf all hongry. But they basically whip you across the map instantly. Thus, as far as I'm concerned, teleportation.

*** The missus is going to hate that joke. Dwarfspeak seems to involve mostly facerolling k, z and r a lot, with circumflex accents on random vowels. Then she'll get over it later but she'll probably chide me for not remembering it's lily of the laser sword plant or something similar.