THE GREAT FRIENDS WAR
Amateur games can be amusing, until you realize they're dead serious. Zoria: Age of Shattering is a C-tier RPG that reeks of passion. This is made even clearer by the fact that the devs spell it out on the main menu: "This game is a work of passion from a small studio of three developers" (or something to that effect). The studio is Tiny Trinket Games, and while they master the magic behind RPG-stats and numbers, they lack the wherewithal to wrap it into a compelling package.
For a while, I thought they forgot to wrap it up at all. Zoria just keeps on going. Several times I thought this has to be it; the last chapter, the grand finale, but nope, Zoria had another twist in store, leading to yet another chapter. When the ending finally came, after some 42 hours, it was with such an anticlimactic text roll that I could be heard moaning halfway to Middle-earth.
Afterwards I felt dead inside, looking back on an experience that emulated the genre juggernauts without any semblance of originality, nor challenge, nor philosophical depth, nor aesthetics. RPG:s thrive in immersion and personality. Playing an RPG is so much more engaging when you're surrounded by an intricate world, that you view from the point of a fleshed-out character. But Zoria is too old-school. The world lacks distinctive features, all characters are interchangeable and the role-playing is limited to combat roles.
Visually, it's generic and boring as hell, its world consisting of copy-pasted assets that would seem at home on mobiles. Looking down from a top-down 3D perspective, you can rotate, zoom in and out, and tilt the camera however you wish, but buildings and nature constantly obstruct the view. The character models look distractingly ugly. It's hard to take them seriously when they utter dramatic lines about politics, injustice and war. The menus are also an unintuitive mess, with a font that feels too modern and tiny.
You create a character - human only - by choosing from a decent selection of classes. Their unique abilities make them fairly distinctive with obvious roles in your party. Some of them have different exploration skills. The kingsman can repair broken machinery, while the thief can disarm traps, and the battle cleric can restore the party's health and mana at shrines - and so on. This is one of the game's strengths. Had it been a better game, I would've loved to try out different classes and party setups in a replay.
As the story begins, you awaken from unconsciousness after a losing battle. Your homeland of Elion is being invaded by Izirian forces. After the fall of the Great iron chain - a series of fortresses - you gain command of a military outpost. From there you recruit a small army and plan your retaliation. Before long, however, you learn that there's more to the invasion, as another adversary rears his ugly head. Yes, it's a blasé God among blasé Gods, since Zoria is too inspired by the classics to throw in any surprises.
Everything functions, but nothing is engaging. Considering the small development team, I'd praise the decent complexity of the systems and mechanics. Apart from the nice selection of different classes, you've got a plethora of weapons and class-specific skills to choose from. Companions flood your little outpost, and new ones keep joining throughout the game.
Problem is, said complexity just extends your time finishing an unengaging story taking place in an equally dull world. No character has any personality. The turn-based combat is serviceable, just like the resting mechanic, crafting, cooking and stronghold management. Exploration is fun at first, but pretty soon you get overwhelmed by the amount of items you find. And by holding the TAB-key you highlight interactables in the environment, resulting in you holding it constantly.
The turned-based combat is very similar to Baldur's Gate III. Enemies come in nice variation, but every single one can be dealt with the same way. Through equipment - especially the gear you craft from blueprints - you can min-max your strengths to deal copious amounts of damage. Certain classes get so overpowered I could at times wipe out all enemies with a single attack. The challenge is non-existent - on normal difficulty I never died, not even once.
And somehow, it still manages to get annoying. Getting hit in battle almost invariably causes some affliction, like poison, deep wound, sundered armor or curse, which not even a good rest is guaranteed to fix. Unless you've the right class in your party, like a thief for curing poison or a priest for curing a curse, you need a certain consumable. Or else you need to find an NPC capable of fixing your ailment, or you need to go searching for ingredients for a potion or whatnot to brew at a campfire.
In spite of the turned-based nature, other enemies and animals run around in real-time outside of combat. If they get close enough, they join in. This not only prolongs the fights and changes the conditions you planned for, it also feels ridiculous - as if the fights in fact are in real-time, and you're just taking turns hitting each other. Also, a deer might run through the battlefield and push you out of position. This happened to me twice, once to my detriment and once to my benefit.
It's old-school complexity, and for what it's worth, it's serviceable. Some 30 years ago, the systems would've made this game good. Today, we're spoiled by more; immersion, visuals, storytelling, characters, gameplay innovations. All of this is severely sub-par in Zoria: Age of Shattering. As a complete RPG-package, it is the most flavorless jank I've played since starting this blog.
The quest design, whether main or optional, is abysmal. A questgiver sends you on an errand. You go there and defeat a foe - or fetch an object or whatever - and return, only to be ordered back to the same place to receive new orders. A flawed fast-travel exists, always miles away from where you're currently at, and it never gets you where you want to go. Navigating the terrain is a mess, with thick forest or cliffs constantly barring your path. And the maps are often totally indecipherable.
The voice acting is, of course, also cheap and amateurish. Some of the line-readings feel totally detached, like the voice actors are bored out of their skull. At least a few of them try to sound engaged, but it comes across as forced and quite possibly even worse. Occasionally, they'll pause for a second to ponder the pronounciation of the next generic fantasy term. To my enjoyment, one actor misread the Great fiends war as the "Great friends war", only to use the correct term later in the same dialogue.
Maybe it's an issue with translation - the devs are Romanian - but the writing is generally not great. One NPC said that some ancient relics are "connected by an unseen connection". That's what connections do, they connect. Another example: I clicked on a cat. Its owner said: "I strongly advice you do not the cat, captain". I clicked the cat again, so he said: "Please do not the cat."
I still don't exactly what he.
Even when it's grammatically correct, it's just plain boring. I zone out all the time. A lore text summarizes the history of a city: "Hastily converted into the wartime capital of Elion, after the loss of Erevrand, Thallamar's advantage lies in its position. Far from the Izirian threat..." and so on. It's complete namegasm whenever you read something or talk to someone. I usually give developers the respect of reading through their lore, but this time I couldn't do it. It felt totally meaningless to read sentences that I forgot before they even reached my short-term memory. The information went in through one eye and out the other.
The menus not only look extremely low effort, design-wise. They are a complete mess to navigate, and the interface is beyond bad. The game showers you with loot, and with poor sorting options and no "sell-all" possibility, getting rid of it all is a goddamn nuiscance. You have to find a store and right-click every single thing you want to sell. Equipping your characters, and sorting through all your equipment to find something better, takes forever - never mind the fact that every party member has nine unique item slots to constantly maintain.
I don't know who Zoria: Age of Shattering is for. The obvious answer would be hardcore tactical-RPG fanatics, but I'd say the game is way too easy for people like that. All those creative abilities, items, characters, classes are for naught when you only need a few of them. I quickly found my party setup and stuck with it to the end. The music is good, and so is the lighting, but what good does it do? I'm certain much effort has gone into the lore and story, but it's too shoddily presented to earn the benefit of the doubt.
Easily played, easily forgotten, this RPG is easily skipped. I rate it P for Passion fruit.
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