Zoria: Age of Shattering

6/1/26 - I'd like to say this game reminds me of Eastern European jankiness, such as King's Bounty (which I liked some of those games too). Sometimes it's charming, sometimes it's very frustrating. [spoiler]I'm currently trapped by my not wanting to swap out a party member for a thief to open a single chest because the kits you can buy for all other class abilities do not apply to this ONE chest and I have like 5 quests including the main story line one hinging on this now. It's a real ugly bottleneck and sucks. I would rather play the party I've painstakingly assembled. I did not swap out party members at all, maybe they think that's how you should play.[/spoiler] 5/30/26 - I made a small guide for new players, the game leaves a lot of things unexplained. This is not everything but there are a lot of tips I wish I knew when I started playing. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3735544111 5/28/26 - Keep upgrades, rolling hills, a rumor system from all NPCs. This game just keeps getting better the longer I play it. This is a gem, I don't even know how I found it but I hope they make more. [spoiler]TIL that I've been doing economy wrong. I've been selling gear my party didn't need... only to find out you can gear your NPCs that you send on missions and you need to upgrade other things like the Burrow so they can rest otherwise you have to juggle people in and out to rest them manually which is extremely tedious. Instead of selling gear I should have been selling easily replenishable materials like some of the ores, bones, entrails, deer meat, things which are everywhere and you can passively gather/sell them (not all of them obviously, you still need cooking buffs, but things regenerate when you leave/come back to areas so it's essentially infinite money potentially.[/spoiler] 5/22/26 - There is an Equipable Items filter, it's just not obvious. There is a missing system you can send NPCs on. The game is much more instanced than the original area but still good and for only being a 3 man team they're punching well above their weight. Well made indie game, you can feel the passion. I appreciate mostly being able to walk through connected areas. Great music and sound design set the tone, real voice actors, would welcome more of this. Quicksave/load is how all RPGs should be. Movement is mostly fine, occasionally one of your NPCs will get stuck which is annoying, more so when they aggro, but I haven't encountered any game breaking bugs. Gearing is a bit frustrating, stats are confusing (why does my character have an energy pool but nearly every Skill says Intellect is primary not Agility?). Windwalker is what I tried, it shows Intellect and Strength for most Skills but I can't use swords which have magic damage stats for some reason? I equip an axe but have no melee attack at all? Sometimes mobs are completely immune to attacks but you don't know that until you waste action points and are already in combat. I would love some QoL such as being able to set my own waypoints on the map, autoloot, Undo (at least for movement) in combat (misclick can screw you hard). The camp anywhere/any time is a good mechanic, inventory is kind of a mess, would like a 'only show things equipable by this character' button, stuff like that. Overall nice work though.

Zoria is a very good game, but you might need some time to appreciate it. Starting from combat, which is turn-based, there are all kinds of features: action points, skill cooldowns, mana consuming and a fatigue mechanism. And on top of that, each character has a second mana-like resource, called focus, which is consumed not only by most combat actions, but also during resting (!) and real-time adventuring and is only restored by some specific combat actions. Sounds complicated? Indeed, might feel strange at the beginning, but after some battles this unique combat style becomes a very captivating and satisfying challenge. Another thing that takes time to realize is the vast potential of the crafting system, which is one of the best I ‘ve ever seen in games. You can combine a huge number of different materials in every possible way, producing unique and powerful equipment. Talking about equipment, another amazing thing in Zoria is that there are literally hundreds of different types of equipment, each of them with its own statistics and appearance (just three people made all these?...). Items have complex statistics, however item comparisons are provided together with item descriptions, making things clearer. There is a lot of loot around and all these factors make inventory management and equipping characters a demanding job. Castle management also comes later in the game; you have to wait for it too. And with it, dozens of candidates for recruitment start pouring in. (all but three though are just generic characters). Zoria has a very interesting story with notably nice writing, tons of lore (again, just three people made all these?...) and a major twist towards the end. There is a good number of side quests also. Last but not least, character development. Zoria’s character development is much similar to games like Wartales and Battle Brothers. At level-up the player can increase some numerical values and at some levels learn a skill. Skills provide combat actions like special attacks, spells, buffs, even stunning opponents. There are 10 classes and each class has 17 unique skills to choose from. Actually, character development is the only area I would wish for more. I think character development is a core characteristic of RPGs and, even though it would be too much to ask for some gargantuan system like Pathfindrer:WotR, some more depth and options would be welcomed. On the other hand, it could be said that 170 skills in total isn’t a small number. Overall, Zoria is a very good game, recommended especially for people who like turn-based tactical story-driven open-world isometric fantasy RPGs, with much exploration and side quests and also things like advanced crafting, castle management and a wealth of equipment. A nice, well written story too. It could also be appealing to people who like strategy/RPG hybrids like Wartales or King Arthur: A knight’s tale. So, Zoria is one yet addition to the list of fine but overlooked RPGs which deserve some more attention.

I really liked the look and feel of Zoria but there are too many gamebreaking bugs. In one of my first encounters, the enemy NPCs entered combat but since I was in the inventory menu, we didn't get locked into combat so the NPCs were not able to do damage to us. Another encounter, a battle could not trigger until I exited the game and restarted. Upon reaching Kristjan I was unable to speak to him or any of the other hostage NPCs, so it appears I cannot progress. All this was under one hour of the game. I was really impressed when I first started the game by seeing how small the dev team is, but it shows given the bugs I encountered instantly.

I gave it a shot, really didn't like what I saw (bad UI, bad character creation, bad colour palette, mediocre graphics, clunky gameplay), and encountered an issue in the first few minutes so I'm not going to be able to recommend this one. The main issue was that the very first quest, a quest that you MUST do to make any progress in the game at all, was bugged for me and the game would not mark one of the three tasks for that quest complete even though I did the task. This game isn't in early access, it's been out since Match 7, 2024, so there should not be a game breaking bug present in the first 10 minutes of the game that won't let you get out of the very first building. Because of this bug I couldn't make any progress in the game so I refunded the game.

Really hate to leave a negative review for a small/indie studio, but this just doesn't click. Skill trees are tiny. Everything feels standard, uninspired, nothing memorable or new. There are a few nice gameplay mechanics, but it all feels like it's borrowed from something else, just way more limited. Couldn't get too far into this. Bummer.

Alright I have been reading all the negative comments on this game and i am just saying everybody is wrong... I have played 20+ hours on this game and the game have everything... loot, quets, story, orcs, dragons.... a big map to explore... and more (if you are a old Diablo fan, this game will be up your ally 100%) I love this game and I will send a big thanks to the developer to make a super amazing game - keep up the great work :)..... if your are a RPG fan, then this game just the way to go...

I was initially just going to refund this one and leave it alone. But I just cant. This game sucks ass. It is a broken, buggy, pile of steaming ♥♥♥♥. It is SO BROKEN then when I started over because I didn't like the class I picked initially, the new character, as a new class, in a new game had the same stats, gear, and skill tree of the previous character. It even had the previous characters NAME still, I named it something different! The music is terrible. Like, just turn off all sound. It will make you wish you were deaf. The story reads like a fourth grader who just learned what LotR was wrote it. Wait, no, sorry, that's mean to aspiring young writers. They probably ChatGPTed this actual trash. The animations are so stiff and awful that they may as well actually be a slide show. Combat is a joke. You just swing away and things die. No strategy involved at all. The action point system is objectively bad, because you can move OR act. There are "side attacks" but the direction they trigger from seems arbitrary, as my dude got smacked in the face and took a side attack. Also they have side attacks but no back attack. That's just lazy. What can you expect from people who love bullies on their forums though? But again. They don't even know how to handle a new character in a new game, so I shouldn't expect them to understand how to make good...anything else at all. I was really just going to refund this and move on from their fifth rate "effort" at game development. But they want to defend objective bullies on their forums. They love the negativity of somebody getting pissed and ranting about friendslop because somebody had the audacity to ask about co-op. ♥♥♥♥ this game. ♥♥♥♥ this dev team. 0/10 - literally without any merit or value at all.

I'm enjoying this game and recommend it, but with reservations that might apply to you. First, the game doesn't seem well-balanced. I'm no hardcore player, I like my thrills gentle, but I'm breezing through fights even on the "Hard" setting. There's been no challenge, even in the supposed boss fights. Maybe I somehow blind-pigged my way into a Game-Breaking Uber Party but I think that's unlikely. I've jacked it up to the "Unfair" setting and that's helped the challenge some. Second, there are no resource constraints beyond the first hour or three. At Level 20ish I now have far more gold, supplies, and other necessities than I need, and it's easy to pile on more. There's no challenge here either. Making me sweat over whether I have enough gold to spread around to all the various things needing gold to advance would improve gameplay greatly. Same with the supplies needed for resting and upgrading facilities. Again, I think the problem is not the gameplay itself--which is fun and well done--but balance. Things need to be tightened up a lot to present a challenge. Having said that, I'm enjoying the game as a sort of casual time waster.