Terra Alia: The Language Discovery RPG Reviews

Whenever any game tries to be educational, it's either sort of a good game but bad at teaching, or good at teaching, but a bad game. Terra Alia takes a middle of the road approach and becomes mediocre at both. I sort of like it though. If you make yourself get invested, you can sort of get into the open world exploration. Sort of interesting turn based RPG It does try various novel ways to teach you vocabulary and conversation which can probably teach you a little bit. It's very clear that it could of used another year or so in development.

Good game and really helpful in expanding your vocabulary with words you're not typically taught when learning a new language. I've only done Korean so far and I've only got just over 2.5 hours recorded and I'd say I've already added about 25-30 new words to my Korean vocabulary. It makes learning fun and that's always a helpful for me to retain the information more effectively :D

I wish it worked. As an ESL teacher, I'm constantly looking for ways to integrate video games into the classroom. I’ve tried this game a couple of times with my students. They enjoyed it during the first 10 minutes of gameplay, but then it got boring. The plot is okay, but the gameplay is repetitive. The combat mode feels pointless, and there’s no real language learning involved, even though that’s supposed to be the main focus of the game. Combat mode happens far too often. Completing missions is tedious—it takes way too long to travel from one place to another just to collect an item and progress in the game. The characters lack depth. They greet you, and then suddenly, you’re forced into a fight. The game relies too heavily on translation, which is detrimental to language learning. You can’t control the camera, so it’s hard to look around. On the bright side, the graphics are good, but there are some bugs. All the tasks involve matching words, which quickly becomes repetitive—there should be more variety. It's a great idea, it just doesn't work. If they used all the development power they have to make a flashcard, word matching, sentence completion, memorization vocabulary app, it'd so much better than what the game currently offers.