Thea 2: The Shattering

Have over 10 hours in the game now. Attractive graphics, seems glitch- and bug-free as well. However, there is almost nothing in the way of a tutorial in the game, so you have to learn as you play through it...multiple times. You basically move your party across the world exploring and accumulating resources until you have enough to build a village. On the way, you perform quests for your mentor (?) imp/spirit. Battle occurs when you enter certain locations or when wandering mobs encounter you. While the basics are simple enough, without a better understanding of what impact the different skills/talents have on battle, gathering or crafting, it's a real challenge to beat the game, which can wear down your team in a hurry via physical or moral damage from back to back encounters. In my opinion, not providing even a basic guide to the player base is simply laziness on the part of the developer. I'm not asking for anything on the order of what used to be provided by Microprose or other big companies in the 90s, but a simple guide that briefly addresses all parts of the game and suggests how to use characters to succeed.

The original Thea had its flaws, but it was pretty solid overall. Thea 2 removes some unnecessary complexity, adds some different unnecessary complexity, and mixes in some nice quality of life improvements. The encounter card mini-game in particular got simpler in some ways, but much more complex in others. I virtually never resolve encounters manually, unlike the original. Most importantly, however, it seems torn between a roguelike structure and something closer to an RPG, ending up with the worst of both worlds. It's certainly replayable with accumulating benefits, but the benefits are only marginally useful. At the same time, it's poorly calibrated, such that the game is periodically throwing you into scenarios that you have no hope of either winning or escaping. You can work around this to some extent by saving and restoring frequently, although it's not designed to encourage this. I think the game could work if it picked a direction. Either embrace the roguelike structure and make the accumulated benefits mean something (increasing base stats, e.g.) or calibrate it more like the first Thea, such that encounters are more consistent and manageable. Or possibly make it easier to judge the difficulty of quests and encounters and avoid them until you're ready.

...Thea 2 is sadly a miss. Thea 1 had an amazingly innovative and intuitive combat system, where the placement of cards were also the order in which they were executed. One card is one person, who can either use his skill or step into the fray themselves. Thea 2 takes those cards and place them on a big grid in the most confusing and convoluted way. Cards are no longer one person and you can place them multiple times, breaking that metaphor. Effects, results and stats are also very difficult to see due to a poor UI. Perhaps in order to want to become more mainstream, Thea 2 does away with the wonderful illustrative graphics of Thea 1, in favour of looking like a World of Warcraft/mobile game clone. The developers unfortunately misstepped with this sequel, but please go and buy Thea 1. That game deserves to go down as one of the all time great 4x games!

I loved Thea 1. Thea 2 does expand on thea 1, more resources, more science, more crafting, more possibilities, more more more. Technically this sounds great, sadly in execution, it becomes overly tedious, if you are a completionist like me, you will have an awful time gathering all the resources needed and then change them into whatever you need. The game is neither hard, nor complicated, but the tedium of micromanaging everything keeping taps of all the single resources you need to make this new resource and so on, is cumbersome. It does not help, that especially in later turns, one turn can take ages and you are mostly just clicking 'next'. So aside from the 'more crafting' there is not enough content to keep you busy with story and other things while you are craft and gather things. There is still some of the old thea visible, but its obscured by tedium.