- DEVELOPER: Tiny Trinket Games
- PUBLISHER: Anshar Publishing, Surefire.Games
- PLATFORMS: PC
- GENRE: Tactical RPG
- RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2024
- STARTING PRICE: 24,50€
- REVIEWED VERSION: PC
Zoria Age of Shattering is a turn-based, fantasy RPG where you can customize your party and their abilities to take on a vast array of foes as you explore diverse and creative environments. I know everyone is hopped up on Badlur’s Gate 3, but we need to take a step back and understand this game was created by a team of 3.
Visuals
This three-dimensional game takes place in a high fantasy setting, so you’ll be seeing a lot of goblins, giant spiders, and more exotic creatures like dragons. Don your character with badass looking gear with tons of variety, you actually get to see the individual pieces you equip, though you might have to sacrifice some aesthetics for greater ability bonuses. At the beginning of your game you get to customize your starting character’s looks and class. The character creator was a lot more in depth than I expected it to be. While it didn’t have the ability to customize every little aspect of your appearance, it’s more than enough because often the only time you’ll see your characters’ faces are the portraits on the left side of the screen, or during conversation.
Every attack and spell is accompanied by some flashy animation, with magic being by far the most pronounced and fun to look at. Every time you heal and deal damage, numbers will jump out from the point of contact. Sometimes if there’s more than one source, they will jumble up on top of one another, and make it hard to read which kind of defeats the purpose.
Every environment you traverse is incredibly fleshed out, there’s an amazing amount of set dressing. Every forest, cave, castle, and village is unique. My only complaint is there isn’t any height differences in the battle terrain, everything takes place on ground level. If there was veriticality involved, that would increase combat’s complexity by complicating lines of sight, and making ranged attacks easier or harder to hit depending on if you’re higher or lower than your target. The existing terrain adds a small level of complexity by introducing obstacles you have to navigate around to reach your target, or breaking lines of sight for ranged attacks, but the position my party found themselves in at the beginning of combat was often where they stayed, there wasn’t any reason to move around unless the archer didn’t have line of sight, or if the tank wasn’t already in the enemies’ faces. You can’t move away from an enemy without provoking an attack of opportunity, so why would you ever run away to offer them a free swing at you?
Music & Sound Design
The musical scores and ambiance are incredible. It feels like you’re marching through on a Lord of the Rings adventure, and the ambient sounds of the world around you makes it feel alive. The attack sounds leave a bit to be desired. In a game where combat is the bread and butter, and you’ll be spending about half of your time in combat, I wish there were a variety of different sound effects for each attack. Swinging a sword, shooting an arrow, or casting a spell will sound exactly the same every single time. A little bit of variety would make it a lot better.
Then there’s the voice acting. I’m not sure when, but I realized I didn’t hear any more voice lines about 4 to 5 hours into the campaign. At the beginning of the game, there’s a mixed bag. The important NPCs get voices, but only for the first few lines of dialogue. It was a little odd to only hear part of what they were saying, I’m not sure if it was to save money or what. Some of the NPC’s sound just as good, and others, well, don’t. Some really have the emotion behind them, putting on a very convincing display, while others are definitely not professional voice actors, and some sound like a nervous 5th grader presenting in front of the class, sounding stiff and lackin any variation, and with some unnecessary pauses.
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a small indie team using AI for character voices to save some money, but if it sounds this bad, just don’t have the lines voiced at all. 99% of the dialogue in this game doesn’t have voicing, so it sounds particularly bad when you hear it. The Narrator who delivers exposition about the world and events around you is the only thing that gets consistent voice acting all the way through, and he sounds great, I can’t even tell if it’s AI or not.
Gameplay Mechanics
As I mentioned before, this game is a turn based strategy game. When you’re not running about, smashing boxes for supplies, picking flowers, or sifting through word vomit you’ll most likely be fighting something. The turn order in combat is random every time, as everyone rolls for initiative. You get an amount of free movement, and two action points. These action points can be used for extra movement, using an item, or an ability, such as an attack or spell.
My biggest complaint for combat is not being able to move after you use your action points. If you have free movement left, you should be able to move to cover. Your squishy archer should be able to jump out and take a shot or two, and then duck back behind cover, instead of being stuck in the line of enemy fire, where they absolutely would not be realistically.
Your character abilities will show you their costs, including action points. Your other combat resources other than health are focus, and either mana or energy depending on if you’re a spell caster or martial class. You build focus with basic attacks, and you’ll keep it outside of combat but it will slowly drain. Both classes require this resource for their special abilities, so it forces you to think a little about what you’ll do on your turn, you can’t go full gas and burn all of your mana on spells until nothing is left standing because you need to maintain some level of focus.
Energy and mana function the same way, the only difference is if you’re a magic-using class or not. After each combat, you’ll recover some health and mana, but you’ll also get fatigued. As fatigue builds, you’ll become less effective at combat, so you’ll eventually be forced to make camp and take a rest to recover your health and resources by using camp supplies, and the number of hours you choose to rest determines how much you recover and how many supplies you use. You can’t survive the whole game with health and mana potions carrying you the whole way. Well you might be able to, but who wants to suffer through playing this game with that much fatigue on their character?
While camping, each class has a special effect they can tack on depending on how many hours you rest, such as using fewer supplies, recovering from poison, or removing curses. You can also use ingredients you’ll find throughout the world to create dishes to grant special effects during a rest, such as increasing strength for 30 minutes.
Now to talk about your party. You can have up to 3 members in your party for a total of 4 including yourself. As you progress through the game you’ll meet many people who can join your party, either permanently or just for the current quest you’re undertaking. You can control how your party levels up by distributing their skill points and choosing new abilities. You can try to come up with something really cohesive, but for the most part, you should be able to win fights no matter what you build into. You can also change your party’s formation, controlling how they’ll set up when a battle begins. You can configure your tanks to be in the front line, and your healers and ranged attackers in the back line.
This game also features an upgradable base of operations. You can upgrade your keep to house more companions to hold more people of varying classes. There’s also the Inn, Blacksmith, and Alchemy stations to upgrade to give blueprints, recipes, and resources. Your outpost also has a missions table, where you can send your companions off on missions for rewards, but you must fund their expeditions with food supplies and gold.
Story
I can tell that a lot of world building went in to this game, and the story you play through excites me just as much as my hypothetical daughter’s first dance recital. That’s to say really excited in the beginning, and the longer it went on the more I wished I was doing literally anything else. I found myself skipping most of the dialogue after the first few hours, because I was overwhelmed with the amount of reading that I needed to do. I’m not here to read things, I’m here to beat up monsters and cast cool spells!
Anyway, the premise of the story is there are two warring factions, The Izirian Empire and Elion Empire. For the longest time, they’ve been stuck in a stalemate, neither being able to deal impactful blows to the opposing side, until the Izirians began using necromancy. Being able to raise the dead to send them to battle, and raising fallen soldiers as they’re slain gave them the numbers advantage by a landslide. This is a pretty cool premise, except for when you start the game you don’t encounter any undead, like at all. I don’t know about you, but I feel like living soldiers are much more valuable than zombies, so if I could throw hordes of the undead at my enemy, I would easily be doing that instead, without a second thought. It’s especially odd considering it’s the literal premise of the game.
Verdict
All in all, this game is okay. Personally, I wasn’t very gripped by it, but if you have the patience for an ambitious game that doesn’t have the same kind of polish like Baldur’s Gate 3, I could recommend this to you. It’s also only 24,50 euros, and if you play this all the way through you’ll get way more than 25 hours of it. Most of the Steam reviews are positive, and many of them have well over 25 hours. The game is also seeing regular updates and fixes, so there’s surely more content coming.
English (UK) 
Hrvatski