Game:

Thea: The Awakening (2015)

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Review

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Thea: The Awakening - First Impression Review

Thea: The Awakening is a 4X survival strategy roguelike with card based resolve mechanics and strong rpg elements, and also some choose your own adventure style events and quests that happen at random. It's made by MuHa games. In this video I review Thea: The Awakening, with a focus on the gameplay, and try very hard not to harp on why traditional genre titles are quickly becoming useless in a world where games are picking and choosing mechanics and gameplay elements from everything in order to create something new.

I should also mention that although this is styled as a review, it is based on my first impressions of the gameplay in Thea: The Awakening. I haven't gotten very far into the story and I haven't spent hundreds of hours playing Thea. That said, the gameplay seems like it could be fun for quite a long time, and there's a bit of replayability in the form of unlocks, which I don't talk about in the review. Thea also has some lore based on Slavic mythology mixed into a traditional fantasy setting.

Thea: The Awakening on steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/378720/

Thea: The Awakening website: http://muhagames.com/projects/the-awakening/

Thea: The Awakening - First Impression Review summary:

There are 3 basic modes of gameplay in Thea: The world map, choose your own adventure style events, and card challenges.

From the world map, you can manage your settlement and expeditions in 4X fashion. Instead of having a populace, you have individual characters who can be equipped and level up like RPG characters. Thea is also missing the expansion options of 4X games. You can only have one settlement, and it doesn't increase in size. I was initially disappointed by this, but found that other parts of the game make up for it, and that this provides an incentive to send out expeditions to explore the world and gather distant and valuable resources.

Expeditions in Thea: The Awakening are adventuring parties that you can send out. They are mobile, but can set up camp to gather resources. Both the village and expeditions need enough food and fuel to survive. Sadly, I found the best bet was to create a single massive expedition rather than many small ones (at least early on). This lead to some turns where I had nothing to do but pass until my units finished gathering resources. Luckily, turns are quick because there aren't any enemy civilizations (the enemy is the world itself), so this didn't slow down the gameplay at all.

Thea: The Awakening also features CYOA style events. These range from simple events with no option but to fight, and more nuanced events associated with quests. Events usually lead to a confrontation that must be resolved by way of card challenges.

Where many games have resolve mechanics for combat, and nothing else, Thea: The Awakening has unified the gameplay across each of its 9 types of card challenges. In order words, the same minigame plays out each time, but the character attributes that each action depends on are different depending on the challenge type. This does reduce the variety a little, but the different builds each character has, and the randomization makes them a bit different. Plus, it's possible to quick resolve challenges.

Crafting is a huge part of Thea: The Awakening. Crafting is is based on recipes which must be researched. Each recipe is somewhat broad, and allows for a lot of ingredient substitution. The final product depends on the ingredients used. So a mithril axe would be better than a steel axe, and also provide different stat bonuses. The same system applies to constructing buildings, and cooking food, but they give different bonuses.

I thought the setting felt a little generic because of the presence of the typical elves, orcs, dwarfs, and wizards, but the Slavic pantheon and mythological demons spice it up a little bit.

Overall, Thea: The Awakening is a very fun game. It has a lot of different gameplay elements but they seem to work well together.

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