Thea 2: The Shattering

Don't blame the devs, blame the engine. Or maybe blame the devs for using the engine, though i doubt they knew that unity installs analytics into all its games nowadays. Who knows.

...and it's an odd set of parts. Thea 2 is like a 3X (not much eXpansion) rogue-lite survival RPG with crafting and text adventures. But the parts all work and are a lot of fun in how advancing in one area makes you better able to handle challenges in other areas. There's a very strong "just one more turn" vibe to it. Docked one star for lacking a bit of polish. It's stable and there's good content, with more being added, but some of the work they did post-release probably should have been ready before the full release.

I love this game! Here are some of its great points in my opinion (not in a specific order): - flexible crafting: each item or building "recipe" can accept differents materials, changing the properties of the crafted item depending on the ones you use - multiple paths and ending: each quest (includings the main ones) offers you different choices that can drasticly impact its outcome. Having different characters in your team (class, race, stats levels,...) can offers uniques choices, allowing a lot of replayability - quest narrative: the quest narrative is perfectly done. You don't have to read for hours, it's not too simple and the lore is interesting - food variety: having multiple different foods give bonuses to your characters, encouraging you to have a varied diet, without forcing you - team management: you can keep a single nomad party, split it to cover more ground and/or settle one or more villages (to a maximum of 3 I think). Each way of playing has its pros and cons - village management: as said above, founding a village is optional, but it is a great way of improving multiple things. First, you can store all your materials in it. Secondly, you can improve your defenses, crafting and gathering skills trough the construction of buildings. Beware: your village is not a safe place, you can still get affected by events or attacked by roaming ennemies! - character management: each character has a class that gives him/her access to different skills and a better chance of improving certain stats. You are free to equip any item you want, allowing for various battle style - combat: the combat is very particular and difficult to describe shortly. I recommend you watch a video of it, because some people might not like it. If it is your case, you can still use the auto-resolve option - tech tree: to be able to gather advanced materials and craft new and better items or buildings, you have to unlock them, making you choose your priorities I hope this was helpful :-)

Reviews are mixed but I actually like this one better than the first so far. The developer could use some education in good UI/UX design as few things are very intuitive, expecially the combat system, but after you get used to things you are likely to settle in just fine. Intial curve is a little high but game does not seem nearly as difficult as some others are saying. Lots of minor bugs, none of them game breaking so far and I have only 1 one CTD so far which is not bad all things considered. Thea 2 seems to have a little to a lot more of everything compared to Thea 1. Hopefully the dev will continue to improve upon this game with future updates or sequels.

Artwork is beautiful, nice graphics. No documentation anywhere though on the mechanics of this game. I have no ideal what I'm doing in the game. I can't believe they released this game without a PDF guide of some kind.