This is not a strategy game, it's a puzzle game.
I especially appreciate the campaigns which places you as the underdog, rather than the imperialist colonizers. However, the game is BRUTALLY difficult. I'm a number of missions in and I get completely steamrolled by the AI (and no, it's not one of those missions where you have to flee... I have triple checked that).
When you have to wait for the animation to finish before you can click on a highlighted button in a modern game, that's not "retro" or "oldschool", it's just bad design. This game feels just old, without any nostalgia and I don't understand why I should play it. There's no QoL or modern convenience added here, so unless you want slightly better graphics, you could just as well play the original. This game, unfortunately completely misses the point for me. I'm worried about Muha, because Thea 1 was a classic, and Thea 2 similary missed some of the points of what made the original good. I don't think they, as a developer, are heading down the right path, but at least I hope they got paid a lot from Slitherine.
The game is gorgeous (though weirdly, the RTS portion of the game looked better in the original) but unfortunately options are quite basic. Though there are many upgrades to buildings, they all feel inconsequential and planning upgrade paths is hampered by poor UI. Diplomacy is extremely limited, and if you don't do the RTS portion, warfare feels similarly limited. There's not even seasons and the courses of entire wars have changed throughout history due to harsh winters. Never had any significant random events either. No plague, no droughts. Also, some games you get steamrolled in after 30 minutes, some games you win after a few hours without really understanding why. Still, fun for a few hours, but don't expect more.
Devs abandoned the game (posted on their official Discord). Don't expect any updates. The overworld just went through a major change before "release" so it naturally feels very rough and unfinished. The rest of the game also feels "weird", probably due to lack of polish. I guess animals will now eerily forever be frozen in place in the game, since they never added any behaviors to them. There's some hours of fun to be had, still. It's really too bad that they couldn't continue with it, because there aren't super many games in this genre yet and very few with this theme.
The VR update has been out on Steam for over a year now, and it's still not out on GOG. The developers were recently bought by a huge corporation called the Embracer Group, so there is no excuse for this. It's really quite sad how GOG is treated like crap by so many developers.
...so I don't really know if it's good or not, because I don't want to play it without a gamepad. It's weird, the game picks up other peripherals like some old Unity indie games do, but this is a AA game on a custom engine. I read that the developers want to release DLC for the game still, so I hope they plan to fix the gamepad issues as a part of that.
Be warned, even though this is on GOG, you have to accept a privacy policy and separate EULA to play this game (despite being in the EU)! Beyond that wall seems to be a great game by the strategy & tactical master, Julian Gollop.
...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!
This is a very pretty game, but unfortunately it puts aesthetics above user friendliness. It's rather finnicky to select things, the targets are very small, issuing orders had a lot of tedious clicking, and also, the resource collecting gameplay is ripped straight from an RTS, except that instead of waiting, you actually have to click end turn several times. Several, several times. The game also lacks a lot of feedback and information as to what is going on (a common issue in indie strategy games), and it lacks some basic things like drag to scroll the map. Also, the game describes obstacles in your path, but... you never actually see them?
