Zoria: Age of Shattering chose an interesting time to come out, an isometric RPG just as the largest part of the Baldur’s Gate 3 hype has just finally begun to ebb (though it’s still very much alive). With a small team of three, Tiny Trinket Games does its best to wedge itself into a genre currently experiencing a bit of a renaissance.

Zoria notably lacks the polish that its contemporary peers with bigger budgets have, making it much more fair to compare it with the classics of the genre. While playing, I felt more like I was back playing Neverwinter Nights 2 than anything newer. Which kind of makes sense since it’s allegedly been in development for approximately 7 years.

Zoria: Age of Shattering
Developer: Tiny Trinket Games
Publisher: Anshar Publishing, Surefire Games
Platforms: Windows PC
Release Date: March 7, 2024
Price: $24.99 USD

In Zoria: Age of Shattering, players take on the role of Captain Witherel from the fictional kingdom of Elion. Elion is at war with Iziria, a mystical nation that has recently turned to profane magicks like necromancy, as well as disturbing ruins belonging to an ancient civilization more powerful than either Elion or Iziria realize.

Witherel is a distinguished commander and is given leave to take command of an outpost near the frontlines. This outpost is where most of the game takes place, Zoria is a system heavy game that tries to keep players engaged with a network of menus and mechanics. Unfortunately this part of the game is the most disappointing part.

There’s crafting, there’s base management, there’s units to recruit, fatigue to manage, and missions to dispatch your units to. A few of these by themselves would have been fine, collect resources to build up a base, send units on missions to collect supplies, snip it and ship it.

But when I started running low on supplies I realized I couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to get more. Same for crafting, it’s much easier just to wander around and use whatever gear looks decent than it is to try making your own.

Zoria also fails to impress with just how busy they try and make the crafting system. There’s approximately 100 different materials between cooking, alchemy, and forging (I stopped paying attention to the materials near the start of Chapter 3) but I played the entire game without crafting a single thing. It’s ambitious, but unneeded in my opinion.

Here’s some interesting facts about my achievements after I beat the game.

• I never ate cooked food
• I never used the forge
• I never crafted any consumables
• I only did one mission at the mission table
• I only upgraded my Outpost twice

I just didn’t feel compelled to interact with these systems after it became apparent they were just vapid fluff.

That’s a common theme with Zoria as a game: it’s ambitious, and that’s worth something. A small 3 person team made it over the course of 7 years, there’s voice acting, there’s lore tidbits, there’s sidequests, and more.

If more of the game was focused on the main story instead of trying to make these subsystems work, it’d be a shorter game but it would be better for it. As for the combat, it’s fun but it’s hard for me to judge it fairly, in the time I played it at least two patches altered combat, albeit for the better!

Originally allies blocked line of sight and there was no free movement, meaning it was always preferable to make enemies come in range of you first. Luckily that’s been fixed and fights are more engaging early on and a little easier.

The only problem I have is that the environment is still live even when turn-based combat begins. In the tutorial, there was a cow that was actually shoving both allies and enemies around the map. I have no idea if it was fixed in one of the patches and while it may have been funny at the time, it absolutely spoiled immersion.

A lack of polish and attention to the boring parts of game development shine through. I won’t say there’s no attention to detail, there’s plenty of verbose lore tidbits to find, but there’s inconsistencies in the game that feel like oversights. One of the biggest ones are Shrines.

There’s two types of Shrines, ones that give a buff, and ones that heal. The tooltip for the ones that buff say they may also remove debuffs, but I could only have my debuffs removed by the statues that healed. It’s things like this that leave Zoria behind as more of a portfolio project of what Tiny Trinket is capable of rather than a well-balanced game.

Another system that seems big at first but can be largely ignored is debuffs and class exploration abilities… in most cases. All you need is: Wizard, Lancer, Kingsman, and Battle Cleric and you can do most anything. The first three unlock new areas, the last one lets you avoid resting by cleansing them at shrines.

I encountered several bugs that forced me to reload a save, one of them included getting stuck behind horses, another involved the delay created during Attacks of Opportunity. I had a unit move and provoke an attack, it had a buff that caused damage when being hit, which killed the attacker. The game then decided it couldn’t proceed with the encounter.

Finally, in the final boss fight of the game there can be two phases depending on your choices, I loaded an autosave that somehow managed to be between the first and second phases and it behaved in a way that I couldn’t end the fight (there’s also a bug where someone who died in phase one can exist as a “living” dead body with 0hp, it’s not gamebreaking but I used him to tank the boss).

To be honest, the combat in Zoria just isn’t very fun. It’s about exploiting the enemy AI or just having high enough initiative and powerful spells to kill anything before it can act. Enemies range from little goobers with basic attacks, to absolute scumbags that can summon more enemies. To top it all off, almost every encounter late game felt like it had at least one enemy with an AoE big enough to make formation almost pointless.

Ultimately, Zoria feels very indie in both good and bad ways. I feel like a lot of passion was put into this project due to all the lore, sidequests, and systems were added to the game. On the other hand, mechanically it’s a lumbering behemoth, overburdened by irrelevant and sometimes boring systems.

The best thing I can say is that I really liked how the story ended, and ultimately while I didn’t feel like I wasted my time, I definitely won’t be going for 100% completion. (I always appreciate a Thanks for Playing message though).

Zoria: Age of Shattering was reviewed on Windows PC with a copy provided by Tiny Trinket Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.