Zoria: Age of Shattering Reviews

Great game

Very hard to control your party.

There is no point in creating a squishy character like thief etc as enemies directly target that toon and kill it in 2 hits. What is even worse, your main character always run in the front on the world map, so when there's a battle he gets attacked first, regardless of how you setup your party formation. Dodge mechanic etc does not work. Imbalanced game.

I'm trying not to be too hard on this one because it's an indie game, but I honestly can't recommend it. Zoria is a pile of great ideas that ultimately go nowhere. You have around a dozen different classes which boil down into around 5 archetypes. Tanky fighter, non-tanky fighter, magical ranged attacker, agility ranged attacker, and healer. Non-tanky fighters are worthless because the AI will target the weakest party member they can reach and focus fire them down, so you cannot have a party member in melee range of the enemy if they are not tanky. In theory there are environment hazards that can only be cleared by a single class, but all this means is you either have to walk back to town and swap out for the correct class, or you need to buy kits that let anyone pass those obstacles. In several areas there are two identical obstacles in a row for apparently the sole purpose of punishing players who didnt bring enough kits. This was an extremely irritating design decision. There is also a section of the game where you are cut off from access to town, so any obstacles you're not prepared for at that point are uncrossable. There is no foreshadowing of what kits you'll need for this section, so hope you guessed the right party or stocked up. Most other systems are just half baked instead of outright broken. Crafting is weirdly implemented where materials are laying around all over the map, but there is very little reason to engage in it until endgame because blueprints are randomly generated, so chances are you won't get one that can be used by a chosen class. Near the end of the game you get a bunch of full set gear blueprints for each armor slot for each class which are leaps and bounds better than anything else in the game. Class abilities are wildly unbalanced. Some are worthless (spend 2 AP to deal 1.5x normal damage? Why not just attack twice?!), while others are ridiculously overpowered (the Battle Cleric ability to give your whole party damage reflection). Most stat increase abilities appear to be broken in the non-functional sense of the word, a 200% increase in armor doesn't appear to reduce damage taken at all. There are two bugs with shrines. If you leave an area and re-enter, the shrine cooldown resets, so you can stack bonuses to insanity. To balance this out, if you save and reload a game, all your shrine buffs are lost. There isn't much of a reason to cook or eat food, most of it is just there to combine into supplies. The writing is okay. Not bad, not great.