The future and faith of your town and people depend on you in Zoria: Age of Shattering.
Role-play games are titles where people can see themselves as the savior of problems and problems. Since most of the detailed RPG games are medieval-themed, it is not surprising to see a new one appear right under the shadow of a popular title.
The core mechanics of a turn-based role-play game is to have a thriving theme and characters you can easily fall in love with after you created them, and Zoria: Age of Shattering achieves that despite not delivering some of the key elements of a well-built RPG.
While going into Zoria: Age of Shattering, I was not expecting to have any problems regarding the core mechanics. After all, it seemed like a barebones role-play game in which you must reconquer your city and bring back the serenity of your people.
The story follows you, the captain of the last remaining squad, as you are pushed back to your home base. Having no chances, you and your team of soldiers push them back with what you have and start taking back your land from the occupiers.
The only problem with being unable to keep them back is the necromancy that occupiers enforce. Necromancy is, allegedly, a magical way to bring back life for the dead. Therefore, the occupiers can keep their soldiers alive all the time despite our efforts to kill them.
This was heavily emphasized in the books and narrative, where magic is uncontrollable, and the Kingdom of Ellion had to stop the madness before everything fell apart. Unfortunately, they lost two of the three remaining fortresses, and we must revive Zoria from corruption.
Just like a typical RPG, the first thing you do is choose your gender and which class you want to play in. At first, I thought it would be a simple three or four classes to choose from, but Zoria: Age of Shattering gave me many options.
Priests, thieves, sentinels, archers, and more, each with different abilities and effects, can stir up your gameplay depending on which one you want to spend your time building up. What caught my attention was the class’s “resting” ability for the party members, but I’ll talk about what it means soon.
This whole meme is about how people usually spend hours upon hours creating their character before even starting the game. I do not blame them; some titles can offer extremely detailed character design screens. What comes to my mind first is obviously Baldur’s Gate 3, which employed every single bit about facial structure, body type, scars, and whatnot.
The same can be found in Zoria: Age of Shattering, but to a shorter extent. Sure, you can easily choose the facial structure, hair, and scars with custom colors, but it’s not as detailed as some other RPG titles in the market. Not to mention that after taking a good look at the character and texture models, it becomes obvious why the game is meant to be played from afar.
If you are not even used to playing RPG games, Zoria: Age of Shattering might be a good welcome title. However, I must warn you that the game throws you into the heat of the battle right away and dumps you with pages of information and controls to remember. Before getting into the action, you first need to find some resources scattered around the beginning area, and this is where Captain Vision comes in.
By pressing TAB, everything important gets highlighted. From enemies to allies, from chests to weapons, it is a great addition to scan the area and choose which direction to take before tackling main quests. The objects marked with yellow during your Captain Vision drop crucial items to help you aid with the battles, which means you should always be looking after those crates and chests. Though it sounds very well and dandy, sometimes they can drop loot that your character build won’t be able to use.
I know the class system is important and balances everything out, but finding armor, shield, or weapons that neither your class nor your party members utilize and automatically picking them is a bit of a stretch. Every class has its unique playstyle; therefore, certain items cannot be used by certain classes. Despite not wanting to play, let’s say, Sentinel and not having one in your party member, the random generator could just keep spawning Sentinel-related items.
Since you can’t do anything with them, they usually collect dust in your inventory—unless you find a clergy member to sell them off in the wilderness. Once I got an item for my archer build, I was so happy to change things—only to find out the new item was comparatively worse than the one the game gave me at the beginning.
The combat in Zoria: Age of Shattering is the traditional turn-based style that you would find in classic RPG games. My initial thoughts were how you approach your fights and that you would either have the first or the last move.
With the good condition of my character and party members, I would be up to initiating a clash between the enemies, but it would just pick randomly who would attack first. It has become a norm in RPG games that the way you approach your enemies- or vice versa- the enemy approaching you determines how battle should be played.
If they reach you from your back, they get the first move and do additional damage because of the angle, but if you happen to do the same, you get the benefits of the opening move. Although the approach does not matter, your character’s stance does matter while doing damage or receiving damage. Side stance or turning back to an enemy doubles their damage and rarely adds critical hits.
Here comes the fun part of Zoria: Age of Shattering: the combat itself. According to your chosen class, players can get a specialized skill tree to build upon. The UI isn’t helping much in the case, whether you are eligible to choose some of the skills in the tree, but they give you a vague idea of how to and when to get them.
Like a typical RPG game, our characters in Zoria: Age of Shattering also gain EXP by getting into fights, crafting, cooking, bartering, and more. Once you build up enough EXP, leveling up opens more doors to becoming a powerful, fearsome warrior. As good as it sounds, you still have to bear with the minimum you are given at the beginning of the game.
I know keeping your players updated with the tutorials is important, but Zoria: Age of Shattering has too many mechanics to keep track of. It is kind of mind-numbing. The tutorials are satisfactory; they allow you to pick up on the game’s mechanics and rules.
But being bombarded with them at the beginning of the game seems rather 2000-esque when the games were becoming more popular to the broader audience. Despite not playing RPGs often, I had at least some experience built up to do next, but the game kept blocking me from moving with flavor text jumpscares.
What I liked about Zoria: Age of Shattering is the evenly distributed difficulty system. It offers four different stages of difficulty, easy to very hard, and even normal playthroughs can be challenging because the normal nature of RPG titles requires a bit of experience and forward-thinking.
The fights are evenly out, and with the skill tree always available to be read, you can properly sort which of your party members do and put them in the field accordingly. Although I just mentioned how smooth the ride is with the fights, it can be hard to read your enemy’s attacks and what they do before getting hit.
Talking about getting hit and whatnot, you might want to use some of the items you gathered during your playthrough. So, just like any other reasonable action, you look at your inventory and… It seems a bit messy- because it is.
For some reason, the first option while looking at your inventory is to list every item available to fiddle with- whereas simply showing which items are compatible with the current class would be easier on the eyes. The inventory has an option like that, but it took me some time to realize you could use subcategories to navigate your items.
Inventories can be searched through the main UI, but the best way to properly settle down and check on your party members and yourself is to initiate a camping ground. Simply choose the camping option from the bottom left, and you can rest, do alchemy, check inventory, and craft items.
The resting part is curious because camping is mainly built around that mechanic. If you let a party member rest for more than two hours, their special ability strengthens your other team members, such as removing debuffs, adding defensive buffs, or healing a certain amount.
Zoria: Age of Shattering looks pretty with one exception, and that is staying afar. Character models look a bit iffy, and up close, they can bear a similar resemblance to ones you could find in Elder Scrolls: Morrowind; at least, that’s what models reminded me of.
The sound design is okay; the effects and songs fit the theme of the atmosphere and places you are in, but I felt like it could still be improved. Some songs suddenly change or cannot loop properly, making it a scary experience to have your ears gushed out with a sudden volume change.
I’m not going to lie, but the camera in Zoria: Age of Shattering could also improve, especially once you get in a battle stance. After encountering an enemy, the camera stays the same and usually does not focus on what’s important on the map.
Since you have complete control, there is a high chance of missing an enemy out of sight. It would have been better if the camera took over during the fights- or here’s a better idea: we could cycle through each perspective we have so that the enemy or ally stances wouldn’t be obstructed by anything.
The title promises to take itself rather seriously regarding the story, but I couldn’t keep myself attached to the story of Zoria: Age of Shattering. I guess it has to do with me not liking medieval themes that often, but still, other RPG titles did draw my attention despite their generic and usual take on a mystical and fantasy-filled world.
The developers tried their hardest to keep some characters’ lore and backstory extensive. Still, it feels somewhat uneasy to get accustomed to a character and see them disappear in 30 minutes for lore reasons.
Zoria: Age of Shattering follows the rules of the staple medieval RPGs in the market, which is absolutely fine. The charm of the overworld and replay value in the game are immensely high, but some quality control might have led to a polished release. In terms of gameplay, it feels close to home but then feels clunky at times to put you off, so it’s better to approach Zoria’s world with a bit of a pinch of salt into your inventory.
