PS Plus Extra Game for March 2026 is Getting a Second Chance with Players
Every so often, PS Plus adds a game to its Essential or Extra tier that had middling-to-negative reviews at launch, seemingly to showcase improvements that have happened since then. That’s the case for one of the PS Plus Extra games for March 2026, Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria.
Sony recently revealed the entire selection of PS Plus Extra games coming to the service on March 17, and overall, it’s a strong line-up. Persona 5 Royal, Astroneer, Madden NFL 26, Metal Eden, Blasphemous 2, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, and Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria have plenty of variety and quality spread out among them. However, Return to Moria does stick out like a sore thumb, with a 51 critic score on PS5. A 51 critic score technically indicates “mixed” reviews, but such a score is more likely to chase off fans instead of inviting them in.
The thing is, critic scores are usually set at launch and do not change after then. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either because first impressions and day one sales are important factors to consider, but there’s certainly two stories here. Metacritic has a mixed score of 51, but on Steam, Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria has 73% Mostly Positive reviews. That tells a story of two completely different games, or more specifically, it tells the story of how the game has grown and changed since launch. Now, PS Plus Extra is an invitation to learn more about the game it is now instead of the game it was at launch.
What Went Wrong with Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria at Launch
Read GameRant’s Review of Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria
If someone were to try to summarize Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria‘s big issue at launch, then the best answer would be that it takes the franchise into the survival-crafting genre and just does nothing with it. Lord of the Rings could be swapped out with an entirely different IP, as big or as generic as could be, and it would just be a bland game with nothing special about it. That is devastating for something like a Lord of the Rings game, but there were plenty of other issues:
- Technical and performance problems ranging from long load times and crashes to stuttering and objects failing to render
- Poor, clunky combat with weak enemy AI
- Repetitive, underwhelming progression and map design, worsened by restrictive basebuilding
- A plethora of multiplayer connectivity issues
Drag weapons to fill the grid
Drag weapons to fill the grid
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Technical issues can make a fantastic game unplayable, so when combined with the middling aspects of Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, it was the perfect storm of a lackluster, unappealing game.
Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria launched in August 2024, meaning it’s been a year and a half since launch. Developer Free Range Games did not abandon this title, instead opting to work to fix all the major issues it had. It added major new game modes (Sandbox Mode), expanded the community with cross-play support, and fixed most of the major technical and performance issues. It expanded inventory and gameplay, introduced quality of life improvements to the UI, expanded building tools and decorations, and improved how maps are navigated. A quick glance and summary of the changes cannot do justice to how the experience has been improved.
It’s still important to set expectations as folks potentially give it a second chance on PS Plus. At launch, it received a mixed reception that trended toward the more negative end of the spectrum, disappointing even its core audience: fans of Lord of the Rings and/or fans of survival-crafting games. Now, its reception can be best summarized as mixed but trending toward the more positive end of the spectrum with a stronger appeal for its core audience. Outside that audience is where it gets dicey, but fans looking for either are more likely to be satisfied today than they were in 2024.
At the very least, PS Plus Extra is giving fans a way to check this out for themselves and come to their own conclusions. March is a pretty good month overall, though, so fans should be sure to download and play the games as soon as time allows.