Review anarchistica 2/5 · Jan 12, 2025
Khazad-Dûmb
Playtime: 2 hours (explored until second shadow door)
Intro
This is a bog-standard survival crafting game in which you walk around, gather stuff, have a full inventory, walk back all the way to your base, make some stuff, sleep and repeat. Each time you delve a little deeper into the dwarven city. There's also something that's technically combat.
The Good …
Playtime: 2 hours (explored until second shadow door)
Intro
This is a bog-standard survival crafting game in which you walk around, gather stuff, have a full inventory, walk back all the way to your base, make some stuff, sleep and repeat. Each time you delve a little deeper into the dwarven city. There's also something that's technically combat.
The Good
- Very Easy difficulty mode.
- Character with inventory can be taken to other servers/seeds.
The Bad
- Tiny inventory.
- Items break really fast, even though you're a freaking dwarf making them.
- Story elements are almost non-existent.
- I already noticed exact duplicates of rooms.
- Character creator lacks options like short hair, flowing beard, medium brown hair colour, etc.
The Ugly
- Combat consists of only four elements: attack, special attack, shoot bow & block.
- Insipid AI that always acts the same.
- Very little variation in the environment.
- No free exploration - you can only mine through pre-determined walls.
- There's nothing else to the game, no traits/skills, no item stats/traits, no magic - nothing.
Conclusion
If this didn't have the LoTR license this game would already have been forgotten. It almost feels like an asset flip. They bought "standard survival crafting game", only added LoTR visuals and hired John Rhys-Davies to narrate the intro to make you think it's worth €25. It's not.