Overview
Thea combines choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, exploration, crafting, research, rpg advancement, and card-style tactical combat. The merger of these different elements would work well, but none of them are engaging and the interface is cumbersome.
Storytelling
The story is narrated by a pleasant British voice. Frequently, the player must make decisions. Some of these decisions are story-fluff, others determine a short-term outcome, and others can have long-reaching effects. This successfully engaged me in what was otherwise a relatively generic story with a variety of generic side-quests.
The shortcomings of the storytelling system reflect the failings of the game as a whole. New players and repeat players experience frustration for different reasons.
For a new player, the story is generally quite good. However, encounters can randomly happen. If they happen on your primary team, that's great, but if you have a weak secondary team gathering supplies, any encounter can wipe you out. You fear the encounters and will always pick the "don't explore" option.
An repeat player doesn't mind missing stories of a few side quests, but he gets nothing out of watching the main story repeat itself.
Exploration
The exploration is satisfying in Thea. There are points of interest and random encounters on a fog-of-war map. You can search for enemy cities to destroy so that your gatherers can work in safety. If you need a certain resource you can explore the map to look for it.
Exploration implementation has a few failings. There is incentive to carry around a variety of different foods. This is a neat idea, but in practice there is a lot of annoying micro-management. Also, setting up expeditions and managing them is a little cumbersome. All of these problems could be fixed by a cleaning user interface, or perhaps some automation. Finally, there is a huge benefit to send gatherers with your war party and order them to gather at the end of every turn. However, this is extremely cumbersome and doesn't feel "in the spirit" of the game. I chose to limit myself to only gathering at the start of the turn. This "handicap" is a huge benefit to quality-of-life but in a strategy game it really bothers me to make sub-optimal decisions like this.
Crafting and Research
The crafting system is pretty good. There is some "fun" frustration in trying to gather rare materials. Research points are very limited and must be spent to unlock recipes as well as allow mining of rare materials. For example, if you want to mass produce heavy steel armor, you must spend a lot of research on steel and a lot of research on heavy armor. That's fine if also want to make steel jewelry (you don't) and steel buildings (doubtful). Generally it's a clever system that lets you try different research paths in different games.
The downside of the crafting system is the clunky user interface. When you want to make something you select two or more materials from a big list. The combination of those materials provides different bonuses. It is not easy to understand what material provides which bonus. It's just cumbersome.
RPG Advancement
There seem to be at least 10 different classes of villagers, although there are only three main ones (warrior, crafter, gatherer). Some "classes" are received as story rewards, like perhaps an orc wrestler will choose to join your group. Going up in level is completely automated. What the player has control of is equipment. There are the typical RPG slot items (armor, weapon, shield, two rings, necklace, etc).
There are a staggering number of different benefits you can get from items. There are perhaps 10 different methods of conflict resolution (with combat being the most common). These 10 methods are all affected by different types of bonuses. For example, dexterity will help with combat, sneaking, and hunting. Intelligence will help with tactics and social and hunting. Backstab will help with sneak and social. In all, there must be dozens of different bonuses.
This complicated system ends up being neither good nor bad. It might seem like the player is given a lot of freedom to customize his strategy for dealing with different scenarios. That's true, but the systems are quite complicated and "get the biggest bonuses" works very well. The benefit to a crafted strategy seems marginal over randomly spreading the bonuses around. What you can do is notice when you are weak in certain types of challenges and make a general effort to compensate.
Tactical Combat
The tactical combat is acceptable. There are enough options available to be interesting. This is another area where a player could go to a lot of effort to get a minor advantage, but the game works well enough without having to do that.
Recommendation
In the end, I can't think of anyone to recommend Thea to. My first playthrough felt like a slog because I had to learn the different systems and compensate for the clunky interface. I enjoyed the story enough to complete it, but I wouldn't recommend it. On my second playthough, I understood the systems better and enjoyed the strategy more, but the story was no longer interesting. In the end, I didn't even finish my second playthrough.
Despite not being able to recommend Thea: The Awakening, I am looking forward to the sequel (currently in early access).
No comments:
Post a Comment