Maddmike Steam Curator
Zoria: Age of Shattering is a CRPG made by three people. That’s going to color part of its story, part of its reaction, and undeniably part of the reaction to its reaction. Some people are going to want this thing to be measured by a smaller yard stick—I get it.
I’m not uncharitable to small games with big problems. Comes with the territory of reviewing in this weight category. The littlest indies are the lifeblood of this channel. I try my best to be honest without being cruel, but also give these games the respect of my candid thoughts rather than just patting them on the head because they’re small: if I wore kiddie gloves, this stops being an indie review channel and starts being an indie promotion channel.
I never want to produce a review that discourages any would-be small or solo devs from reaching for the stars. Look, I love my polished little roguelikes but they aren’t exactly in short supply. Some of the most memorable indies I’ve played are ill-advised and overambitious, but I’m willing to trade a little polish if it enables the devs to stretch their legs and do something cool.
The problem with ‘Zoria’ is that it doesn’t make that trade, so you get something undeniably unpolished but without anything cool, or memorable, or interesting to latch on to. Not in its gameplay, not in its setting, not in its tone, not in its story.
I’m on the other side of almost thirty hours with an experience that looked and played like a rough early alpha, but there’s basically no wheat for all of that chaff. It is a bog-standard CRPG in a very sub-standard package.
https://youtu.be/AwZcNwelXJI
Disclaimer: all that preamble is to say that I can’t do my usual balanced review for this one because Zoria isn’t giving me anything to counterweight the criticism with. I’m being sincere when I say a ‘pros and cons’ list would literally have “WASD movement” in the pro’s column, and basically nothing else. My thirty hours would have probably gotten me to credits if it weren’t for all the bugs I ran into. I quit on the final chapter because I kept having to redo fights that would freeze when they started or freeze when they finished, or got my characters stuck in the geometry and unable to move. Zoria wastes a lot of your time and honestly it doesn’t need the bugs to do that.
That’s probably our first problem. Zoria has a big quantity vs quality problem. It doesn’t go the ‘Space Wreck’ route of a small but dense CRPG, but instead tries for the sprawling multi-chapter, continent spanning epic style of CRPG. It even copies the bad base management minigame that all the professional RPGs screw up too.
Most of the time you’ll be alternating between fetch quests and combat, both of which come at you with the intensity of a firehose. Your first moments with Zoria, after picking your class and creating your character (which crashed on me three times), will involve a tutorial that inundates you with pop ups before you’ve even started moving.
Your first quest is to gather some items within the starting room and get you used to the act of looting stuff. It’s almost unreal the quantity of items that just get thrown at you. My inventory had like 40 rare drops after playing for ten minutes.
The game drops like three to four ‘uncommon’ or ‘rare’ pieces after every fight, and you’re basically getting a fight every thirty seconds. If you’ve played the first fight in Zoria you’ve played all of them. You walk up to a group of mobs standing randomly in the open, the fight ensues where you turn based hit your opponents til they’re at 0, then you walk forward like two feet and there’s more mobs and you do the same thing in the same place.
Everyone is just inelegantly sprawled out, there’s basically like no encounter design. You might as well be fighting everyone in a void.
The economy is completely nonsensical. I had 10,000 gold by the time I reached the first real town and the most expensive powerful items that most of the merchants in the game sell are like, 250 gold. The entire currency is basically invalid for the whole game and I didn’t need to think about it. By the way there’s no ‘sell all’ button so even though you’ll frequently go back to town with all 280 of your inventory slots filled you have to click them all individually to sell them.
The build options are, at most, picking between one of two abilities at any given time on the skill tree.
Every single line of dialogue is just someone dryly describing stuff at you with no personality.
The underbaked aesthetic and word software font choice just does not help sell the illusion that you’re in a fantasy world. You’re firmly aware that this is a product in front of you, whose limitations are made manifest every time you touch it, even when it's not breaking. That makes it extra tough when it tries to make you care about ‘Daeg Marastir’ or whatever unremarkable fantasy location is having whatever unremarkable fantasy problem with whatever unremarkable fantasy character and their unremarkable fantasy motive.
The main quest does the Morrowind thing a few times where it stops you and tells you to go screw around with side quests a bit, completely lacking the self-awareness that only worked in Morrowind because the side quests were fun.
In Conclusion
Nothing in Zoria is fun. It is playable ‘content’; just stuff that happens and then more stuff happens and then stuff happens again (unless the fight trigger breaks, then there’s no more stuff until you restart).
I’ve never gotten to the other side of a game and felt the hours of my life so wasted for absolutely nothing in return. Zoria is a bloated, buggy mess of a game that wouldn’t be worth playing even without all those bugs. Enduring it is a painful slog. Zoria’s ratio of minutes-to-meaningful-play would be lopsided even if the game was 30 seconds long, and at 30 hours long: it's a crime.
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