Thea 2: The Shattering

Absolutely beautiful music, artwork, and interface. But the game itself is rather boring usually with a rapid ramp up into difficulty with many mechanics you have to juggle, resources, and hoping for a good map RNG for resources. It's just not very clear what you're supposed to be doing. At first that helps it feel like an adventure, but after a few restarts it loses the charm. It definitely feels like a niche game where you have to appreciate a combination of RPG, survival, and card game mechanics.

700 turns into the game, never played Thea 1, did not need a manual and still enjoying it. It had countless events with different choices and outcomes, depending on your party and the factions alignments. Sound is beautiful, graphics too. The map can be zoomed. Mouse controls could be better, when map is zoomed out it can be difficult to click on the party. When you want to move the party, the map first centers, something which I personally don't like. Although I don't care for games with a lot of crafting and collecting, this one does have that, yet it was agreeable. No need to have the perfect equipment, just play with it as you go along. Midpoint into the game I hit a wall, where quest battles proved to difficult. Again, my own battle progress did not prove to be much better than the outcome of the auto battle system. This is important, because the amount of battles you face is huge, and playing them all out would be pointless. Well, what to do then, with the important quests being too difficult and no other goals around. A bit of exploring on different islands opened up new choices, more quests and actually improved the party nicely. Now I am ready to take on the big bosses. In the meantime founding a single village very late in the game showed me what its advantages can be. And how it needs to be protected. This game is fun, in a relaxed way, and there always seems to be some small encounter or weird monster that I have not encountered yet.

Too complicated and counter intuitive comparing with first Thea and much less optimized. I like story, I like atmosphere of series, events etc. but I really do not like spending time for wikies and guides (excluding in-game guide of course) to just survive.

I don't understand the seemingly low ratings. The progress in the game is very addicting, watching numbers go up is not usually satisfying to me, but this hits the mark by the way of build optimization. Stat upgrades seem semi-random, every level you can upgrade one stat more than the rest of your options, and while it might not be the minmax stat to take, it lets you add versatility to a character, then you can use a mindblowing number of gear to try to exploit it, to make your character that was only a fighter until now be able to tear out someone's soul, so they can aid in magic encounters now. I didn't have an issue with there not being a manual, I didn't even do the tutorial, and most things were completely intuitive to me, however, crafting is a major part of the game, and it is daunting, even after having finished the game once. I didn't even find an extensive wiki. Most of your time will be spent trying to craft the optimal gear so that your characters can function, and fuction effectively in combat/social/magical encounters, several at once, if possible. Depending on what "essence" the crafting materials you use have, the same item you craft might scale with a different attribute, and it might be used in a different kind of encounter. Then you have to think of balancing whether you want everyone to be used in every encounter, or have a small group of elite specialists for each, etc., it's a never ending puzzle. The overworld actions are exactly as addictive as the Civilization games, it has the same "just one more turn" effect on me. Combat can be a bit hit or miss, the main issue being keeping track of initiative, and whether it's worth to take an action to manipulate initiative (usually not, sometimes it's life or death). Autoresolve is an option if you prefer to just stick to optimizing builds and improve in the overworld.

I'd rate this 4.5 stars but this deserves a boost for the overall rating. The mix of 4X and RPG is very well done and quite interesting, the atmosphere is top notch and using Slavic mythology brings a certain dose of freshness to the RPG part of the genre, somewhat off the beaten paths, a change of pace from the usual orcs and goblins. I'd like to point out, having seen reviews which were not to fond of the system, that having 3 "types" of "challenges" (read battles) was pointless. I disagree. I find it quite interesting that they built this part of the game to reflect the fact that note every battle is one of brawn. Brawn, wit and spirituality, three types of battles which deserve to be considered apart from one another. I'm not too fond of card games, but the way its implemented is quite good and as I said, having three types of battle gives more personnality to it all. It does force you to keep tabs on all your characters so as to know which one is better at ouwitting the ennemy, ducking it out with weapons or scaring away spirits, but the fact that your leading a party and not a whole nation as is customary to 4X games makes it manageable.