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. The developers even spell it out on the main menu: “This game is a work of passion from a small studio of three developers” (or words to that effect). That studio, Tiny Trinket Games, clearly understands RPG systems, stats, and numbers, but lacks the ability to wrap them into a compelling whole.
For a while, I thought they forgot to wrap it up at all. Zoria just keeps going. Repeatedly I assumed I was approaching the final chapter—the grand finale—only for the game to tack on yet another act. When the ending finally arrived, after roughly 42 hours, it did so via an anticlimactic text crawl so underwhelming I could be heard groaning halfway to Middle-earth.
Afterwards, I felt hollow. Looking back, the experience mimics genre juggernauts without possessing even a trace of originality, challenge, philosophical depth, or aesthetic identity. RPGs thrive on immersion and personality. They’re at their best when you inhabit a vivid world through the eyes of a well-defined character. Zoria is too rigidly old-school: its world has no distinguishing features, its characters are interchangeable, and role-playing is reduced to combat roles.
Visually, it’s generic to the point of boredom, built from copy-pasted assets that wouldn’t look out of place on mobile. From its top-down 3D perspective you can rotate, zoom, and tilt the camera freely, yet buildings and foliage constantly obstruct your view. Character models are distractingly ugly, making it hard to take their dramatic monologues about war, politics, and injustice seriously. The menus are equally poor—unintuitive, cluttered, and paired with a tiny, overly modern font.
You create a single human character, choosing from a decent range of classes. To the game’s credit, these are mechanically distinct, with clear party roles and useful exploration skills. The kingsman repairs machinery, the thief disarms traps, the battle cleric restores health and mana at shrines, and so on. This is one of Zoria’s genuine strengths. In a better game, I would’ve loved experimenting with different classes and party compositions.
The story opens with you regaining consciousness after a lost battle. Your homeland of Elion is under invasion by Izirian forces. After the collapse of a defensive line known as the Great Iron Chain, you’re placed in command of a military outpost, tasked with recruiting allies and planning a counteroffensive. Before long, it’s revealed that the invasion is only part of a larger threat. Since Zoria draws so heavily from classic fantasy, the ultimate antagonist is—of course—a god.
Everything technically works, but nothing engages. Considering the tiny team, the mechanical complexity is respectable. There’s a broad array of classes, skills, weapons, and companions, with more joining your outpost throughout the game. But this complexity merely stretches out an already dull story set in an equally dull world. No character has a personality. Turn-based combat is functional. Resting, crafting, cooking, and stronghold management all exist—and that’s about the highest praise I can give them.
Exploration starts off enjoyable but soon becomes exhausting due to the sheer volume of loot. Holding the TAB key highlights interactable objects, which sounds helpful until you realize you’ll be holding it down constantly, turning the screen into a visual mess.
Combat is reminiscent of Baldur’s Gate III, though far less refined. Enemy variety is decent, but every encounter can be solved the same way. Through equipment—especially crafted gear—you can min-max your party into absurd levels of power. Some classes become so overpowered that entire encounters can be erased in a single action. I never died in combat, even once, playing on normal difficulty.
Despite this lack of challenge, combat still manages to be irritating. Nearly every hit inflicts a status effect—poison, deep wounds, sundered armor, curses—many of which aren’t reliably cured by resting. Unless you have the correct class in your party, you’ll need specific consumables, NPC services, or crafted remedies. It’s busywork disguised as depth.
Worse still, while combat is turn-based, the rest of the world continues in real time. Enemies and animals can wander into fights mid-encounter, extending battles and invalidating your positioning. On two occasions, a deer ran through combat and physically displaced my character—once to my detriment, once to my benefit. It’s unintentionally hilarious, but mostly just sloppy.
This is old-school complexity for its own sake. Thirty years ago, these systems might have impressed. Today, we expect more: immersion, atmosphere, narrative cohesion, memorable characters, and innovation. All of these are sorely lacking in Zoria: Age of Shattering. As a complete RPG package, it’s the most flavorless jank I’ve played since starting this blog.
Quest design is especially dire. You’re sent somewhere, you kill something or fetch an object, return for your reward, then immediately sent back to the same location. Fast travel exists but is poorly implemented, depositing you far from where you actually want to go. Terrain navigation is a constant headache, with dense forests, cliffs, and invisible barriers blocking your path. Maps are frequently unreadable.
Voice acting is predictably amateurish. Many line readings sound bored or detached; others overcompensate and come across as forced. Occasionally, actors pause mid-sentence to puzzle out the pronunciation of some generic fantasy term. One actor memorably referred to the “Great Fiends War” as the “Great Friends War,” only to pronounce it correctly later in the same dialogue.
The writing doesn’t fare much better. Whether due to translation issues (the developers are Romanian) or general lack of polish, the prose is riddled with awkward phrasing. One NPC explains that ancient relics are “connected by an unseen connection.” Another warns me, “I strongly advice you do not the cat, captain.” Clicking the cat again prompts, “Please do not the cat.” I still don’t know what he meant.
Even when grammatically correct, the writing is painfully dull. Lore entries drown you in proper nouns and meaningless exposition. I usually make an effort to read developer-written lore out of respect—but here, the text evaporated from my mind before reaching short-term memory.
The interface compounds everything. Menus look low-effort and are miserable to navigate. The game showers you with loot, yet provides poor sorting tools and no “sell all” option. Selling items requires right-clicking each one individually. Managing equipment is a slog, especially with nine item slots per party member that constantly need attention.
I genuinely don’t know who Zoria: Age of Shattering is for. Tactical RPG veterans will find it laughably easy, while anyone else will be overwhelmed by systems that never meaningfully matter. You only need a fraction of what the game offers. I found my optimal party early and never deviated.
The music is good. The lighting is good. I’m sure a lot of effort went into the lore. None of it matters when it’s all so poorly presented.
Easily played, easily forgotten, this RPG is easily skipped.
I rate it P for Passion fruit.
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