Zoria: Age Of Shattering speedruns its fantasy RPG story in a quick montage of cutscenes at the beginning, so we can get that out of the way first. A low fantasy world, two warring kingdoms, one using necromancy (which is somehow portrayed as evil and deceitful rather than practical) to gain an advantage, and it’s all named like a few Scrabble letters were randomly thrown on a table. You play as the war hero Elion, Captain Witherel – player gender and class TBD – in a petite group making a last stand in the fortress of Daeg Marastir, which is being taken over by the dastardly Izirian army. We start in a media war, so to speak.
This first stage, where you escape from the fortress, gives you a quick overview of the game’s main systems. You control a party of four, combat is turn-based, you can camp at any time to rest and heal, and there are potion, food, and equipment crafting systems. Zoria doesn’t so much remake the wheel as take the spokes from a bunch of other fantasy RPGs you like, and the result is an RPG terrier. Small, it clearly has a lot of different DNA going on in it, and it punches above its weight, but it’s a bit disjointed, and sometimes its knees buckle and it falls over. This terrier was created by three people, so that’s to be expected.
But boy, does it have spirit. You’re assigned to a secret fortress of sorts near a mountain pass to prepare for retaliation. This fortress can be upgraded to provide bonuses or various potential teammates, and any team members you’re not using – more of them appear with alarming regularity to add to your crew – can be sent on missions to gather resources and so on. There’s a good range of class options, including magic users like Necromancers and Clerics, Thief for your rogue type, Ranger for your bow-wielding archer, and more combative characters like Lancer or Kingsman. I was a Ranger, who’s a more tanky character with gigantic area-of-effect buffs that aid the whole team.
There are a ton of little side effects with your squad. If you have a Battle Cleric in your party, you can utilize healing shrines in the world, meaning you can heal without having to rest, and classes grant rest bonuses that are also useful, like stopping bleeding or healing curses. That’s frosty. This includes some side quest dungeons that require a specific type of character to get through an obstacle – for example, a Kingsman to repair a gigantic door with equipment. But the dungeons don’t tell you this up front, and you have to go back to your fortress to change your party – and then the dungeons aren’t marked “I need a Kingsman!”, so most of the time I just forgot and didn’t feel like finishing those quests.
This is later in the game when the difficulty starts to ramp up again, but the opening was honestly balanced to be so hard that if I wasn’t reviewing it, I would have walked away from Zorii. You have to fight your way through it (also, all the fighting makes the screen go a bit grey, so sorry for the screenshots).Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/Anshar Publishing
Similarly, crafting, while touted as an critical part of Zoria and necessary to getting decent gear, is tedious, complicated, and offers few material rewards. Some of the key ingredients you utilize are demanding to come by and aren’t really explained, so I didn’t bother crafting either, instead relying on gear I earned from killing goblins, ogres, and the like. The alchemy and cooking systems are easier to figure out, though — you craft potions, and meals give you time-limited buffs, Breath Of The Wild style — and you can do so whenever you’re resting at camp.
Resting is something you can do anytime, anywhere, and its main purpose is to restore health, but there are some compelling interactions here too. In addition to the class bonuses and food you have, you need to have enough supplies to actually rest (2 per party member per hour), so you need to keep an eye on how many you have before you set off on your adventure. Resting also reduces your Focus, which is a universal ability juice used by all characters to cast spells or utilize skills in battle. Sometimes it’s better to go into a fight with a necromancer with full Focus so they can cast a huge AOE curse. This achieves a good tactical balance that becomes more pronounced as you enter the game’s more challenging areas.
All of this is in Zoria’s service to combat, which is both good and bad. Like many turn-based combat systems, you have your Action Points to spend on movement, attacking, or using abilities. It’s satisfying to get a cascade of good turns: using your Priest to stun an enemy archer while your Necromancer casts a damage-over-time spell on a tank, but your Lancer has already buffed everyone’s shields, so you can afford to keep both of your wizards in a slightly more risky position. But Zoria also points to systems that seem to be there but aren’t. You can find alternate paths to fights that can put you in a better position, but you can’t really get a sneak attack. Getting your archers and wizards in good positions is key, but there’s no different heights, or, for example, half-cover or the ability to move one character individually to do a pincer attack, so you’re essentially playing every fight in a 2-2 formation, like a football team of fantasy LARPers.
It’s not helped by the fact that there’s some clutter that means sometimes enemies can attack you through huge chunks of rock, fights in buildings with cut-out walls have walls that don’t actually cut-out, and sometimes quest markers will just disappear completely, becoming nothing more than shadows on the cave wall. You’ll be spamming quicksaves, but for the most part the combat is enjoyable enough, especially if you’ve buffed some DPS characters.
You might wonder why I’ve completely abandoned talking about the plot or setting, because it really does give you the background to the systems. This is a clicky, heavily systems RPG. You won’t be fucking any elves, and everything is isometric, so I’m not sure what you’ll get out of that. None of your potential comrades-in-arms have a backstory or personality, and most have a copy in the base, so there really aren’t any emotional stakes in the game on a micro level of combat, or on a macro level of saving the world business.
You won’t find your best friend in Zoria’s side quests. These are tasks like eliminating bandits, helping a local village, but really, no matter the quest framework (missing daughter, lots of skeletons), the result is that you end up in a dungeon and fighting a few waves of lower-level enemies (petite spiders, evil Izirians) before facing an elite boss (a giant talking spider queen, a giant Izarian necromancer). The setting in which you do this is very nicely appointed, with medium-sized maps full of plants and ruined buildings and strange crystals for decoration, and a day/night cycle. The most compelling storytelling comes, instead of line-by-line dialogue, at a larger plot point, when you discover that the Izirians are using unknown, semi-magical technology to teleport past your defenses. It’s intriguing, light-hearted stuff that quickly becomes story-heavy when dialogue and explanations are over the top.
Zoria does many things. It will remind you of Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age, Lord of the Rings, and even the weird fantasy books of Terry Brooks, and many of them are done well and interestingly. But in other cases, the ambition has gone beyond endurance. But in a way, you love your terrier, even if he sometimes pees on your pillows, right?
This review is based on the version of the game provided by the developers at Tiny Trinket Games.
