Thea: The Awakening

 PC
User Score
8.5

Generally favorable reviews- based on 146 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 119 out of 146
  2. Mixed: 16 out of 146
  3. Negative: 11 out of 146

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  1. Kluge
    Feb 15, 2016
    7
    Thea's a good game - one of the best releases in the past few months. It's certainly similar to HOMM, but I think it reminds me even more of Eador. It's just a notch behind being so similar it's a clone. -So I'm just going to compare the two.

    First off, the story in Thea branching, short-but-fleshed-out, inventive, and boring. It strives for the same sense of absurdity and seriousness    Thea's a good game - one of the best releases in the past few months. It's certainly similar to HOMM, but I think it reminds me even more of Eador. It's just a notch behind being so similar it's a clone. -So I'm just going to compare the two.

    First off, the story in Thea branching, short-but-fleshed-out, inventive, and boring. It strives for the same sense of absurdity and seriousness in choices as Eador, and many of the stories are actually interesting, but I never really felt invested, and maybe this is more the mechanics of being able to pop out new units so fast, I actually would get annoyed whenever I saw I had new people to micromanage. This is very different from Eador where you usually only had 2-3 heroes (or even just one for most of a game), and rarely ever 4. Thea lets you bundle your people up into expeditions, but I'm not sure I see the benefit of having 30 semi-customizable units vs 3 very customizable units you've taken time to tailor finely - it certainly makes no contribution to my emotional investment.

    The writing in Thea has some very dramatic attention-grabbers in the little stories it tells. Sometimes, they'd actually shock me -- you know, I just didn't expect my normal-seeming folk to be nailing cats on their walls and sacrificing virgins to a roving band of rapists - it just really caught me off-guard. -So good for them on that, because it's an unusual accomplishment. I'd just be minding my own business hitting the return key every few seconds, watching my villagers collect nuts, and they suddenly decide it's time to take all the kids and put them in a gladiator-style death-match... what? Sure, okay! I hope the sequel will let me bet on who wins...

    The game is at the very least an excellent demo of their Honey Hex engine, but now that I've played Thea, I'm not sure I want to play many more games on the same engine without heavy modifications (it's a very well-made engine having investigated it, that said - but I don't use Unity).

    Back on-track... the combat card game is bad. I like card games, so I figured this would be right up my ally... but it just takes too much time for too low of stakes, and I don't seem to do too much better than auto-resolve, while opportunity rarely presents itself to lose via auto-resolve unless I'm so outmatched I'm screwed either way, so I don't feel any incentive to spend my time in it. -But I shouldn't need an incentive to play a game, right? I could auto-resolve in Eador, but I enjoyed being able to micro-manage there so I could do what I built up my army for, and auto-resolve was typically an awful choice.

    Content-wise, it's just lacking, and mod support certainly doesn't appear to be in the works to pick up the slack. There's a great base, and you see glimmers of an amazing, timeless game similar to Eador, but there's just not enough content in it. You play it two or three times and the experience is very similar but you have the opportunity to choose a slightly different ending. It feels complete, but just too small, like it's just a preview of things to come; maybe the devs didn't have the money to spend more time designing and implementing content, or maybe they didn't actually think the game was as good as it is and wanted to move on to something else to hedge their bets (I don't get this feeling, honestly - I think it was just a lack of time/money, which is hopefully resolved).

    There's a lot to build on here, and another game in this engine by the company is absolutely justified. -So I'd advise buying this as a down-payment for Thea: The Re-awakening, giving it a few playthroughs and then playing Eador if you haven't already (and I can't imagine why you wouldn't have already...).    … Expand
  2. Carewolf
    Nov 25, 2015
    7
    A cross between King of Dragon Pass, Fallen Enchantress and Endless Legend. A post-apocalypse rogue-like/4x-like game where you only have a single village to control where you can explore the wilderness for resources and quest, and try to rebuild your corner of civilization.

    Fine little game. Unfortunately it seems unfinished in the sense that the tutorial is weak and seems only    A cross between King of Dragon Pass, Fallen Enchantress and Endless Legend. A post-apocalypse rogue-like/4x-like game where you only have a single village to control where you can explore the wilderness for resources and quest, and try to rebuild your corner of civilization.

    Fine little game. Unfortunately it seems unfinished in the sense that the tutorial is weak and seems only partially finished, many minor bugs are apparent, and the game pacing is all over the place.    … Expand
  3. GeneStarwind
    Nov 30, 2015
    6
    It's relatively fast paced, has good artwork, the story is solid, the voice acting is the strongest point in my honest opinion and it has a tremendous amount of depth. Play the game on normal or easier and you will see that this game is average at best. It is relatively difficult to understand the depth of the game, yet it is quite fun when you learn. ` ()

    ` Yet despite these obvious    It's relatively fast paced, has good artwork, the story is solid, the voice acting is the strongest point in my honest opinion and it has a tremendous amount of depth. Play the game on normal or easier and you will see that this game is average at best. It is relatively difficult to understand the depth of the game, yet it is quite fun when you learn. ` ()

    ` Yet despite these obvious strong points, the game is unbelievably underwhelming in terms of actual game play, and this is primarily due to the blatant and inconsiderate amount of RNG dumped onto the player. ` ()

    ` Playing the game on any difficulty higher than normal is excruciating. The RNG you have to deal with is unbelievable. 100+ hours later of playing this game (at least 60 of which were save scumming), and I'm shocked that you can't control the most basic elements of this game in the slightest. I keep hoping I'm going to stumble upon something or other that will change this, to no avail whatsoever. ` ()

    ` You are given no choice as to which starting resources you have, forcing you to create a new game over and over and over until you get a good starting set. This can and probably will take hours. ` ()

    ` Save scumming is a necessity in this game to allow you to get proper rewards for defeating enemies and for resetting the position of new resources that you research, if you are even given the option at all, which it seems to me is no longer the case. This is complete time waster and it is extremely punishing of common sense and basic game design concepts. ` ()

    ` You cannot choose which stats your characters receive when they level up. There are over 20+ stats, many of which feel completely useless (Animal Kinship, Attractiveness, Tactics) or otherwise totally underwhelming compared to the primarily useful ones (Gathering, Strength, Dexterity, Intellect, Magic, Will, etc). Leveling up occurs simultaneously and automatically across all of your characters and it occurs several dozens of times for every single new game you play. Meaning in order to get an even basically competent group of characters, you need to save scum over and over and over for every single level you get for a near perfect stat growth for your entire group, which will probably be between 10 to 30 characters. This-is-excruciating! ` ()

    ` You cannot choose which of your characters are placed into combat positions.... I am amazed that anyone would even remotely consider this to be an effective way to design combat..... ` ()

    ` You are forced to flip a coin for almost every encounter to determine who goes first, you or your opponent. If you fail on even the most remotely challenging encounter, you almost guaranteed lose the game and several hours of your time of progress in your current game. And even when you win the coin flip, you still have to deal with the RNG of determining how many cards you can play each turn, which can result in an automatic loss without chance of recovery based solely on RNG! ` ()

    ` You are not given a choice as to which enchantments you place on your items upon creation, almost 99% of which either have an extremely low bonus stat, even when made of the best possible materials, or have the worst possible stat you could get, making the item almost totally worthless for the intended purpose. ` ()

    ` Simple things like being able to choose what your starting resources are, your starting characters, your starting equipment, your character progression, who goes first in combat, which characters you use in combat, where your new resources are spawned, etc, etc, are completely omitted and instead replaced with the most bizarre, overwhelming RNG I've ever seen in my entire life. ` ()

    ` To top it off, there's massive stuttering in this game. It becomes more and more noticeable after researching a few resources. ` ()

    ` This is one hell of an impressively designed RNG simulator. The kind of simulator that prevents the player from having any actual control over anything going on in this game. This is not the way strategy games should be designed.    … Expand
  4. MoreBokeh
    Jan 24, 2016
    7
    This is a solid indie game with a great theme. The rough edges with being an indie are much more noticeable here with bugs, voice acting, and UI issues, but the game systems stand out and are strong. Unfortunately, the storyline and different gods don't vary too much to warrant more than one replay. But if you are a fan of turn based strategies, this is worth at least one to two games.This is a solid indie game with a great theme. The rough edges with being an indie are much more noticeable here with bugs, voice acting, and UI issues, but the game systems stand out and are strong. Unfortunately, the storyline and different gods don't vary too much to warrant more than one replay. But if you are a fan of turn based strategies, this is worth at least one to two games. Better than Renowned Explorers: International Society but not as good as Invisible, Inc. for 2015 releases. Strong resemblance to Armello.… Expand
  5. marc5477
    Jan 15, 2016
    6
    Yet another overrated indie game that should be closer to a 6 out of 10. It has potential, but as it stands now, it is just a lite city builder with card game to replace tactical or real time combat. It does not have anywhere near the depth of other games in its genre like Fallen Enchantress, Kings Bounty, or even HoMM all of which, rate lower than this game which is clearly an aberrationYet another overrated indie game that should be closer to a 6 out of 10. It has potential, but as it stands now, it is just a lite city builder with card game to replace tactical or real time combat. It does not have anywhere near the depth of other games in its genre like Fallen Enchantress, Kings Bounty, or even HoMM all of which, rate lower than this game which is clearly an aberration due to how few have played this game.

    The good news is that this has potential to be good. The city building is not bad, but there are very few things to construct. The few buildings however can be improved with better materials so that adds some variation but its still pretty dull.

    Research is divided into 3 "trees" (note that most new players will only notice 1 tree until they look at the wiki online) and they are materials (allows you to gather new stuff), crafting (weapons, armors etc), and structures (things you can build in your city). The problem is that the trees feel lazy... there are too many variations of the same material or weapon and if you take out the variations, you realize that there really isnt much going on there. The game boasts "4400" craftable items, what they dont tell you is that 95% of the items are just variations of a base item using different materials... this, in my opinion, is dishonest.

    The card combat game is iffy and not nearly as much fun as tactical or real time combat in other games. The card game itself is not as bad as say... Pizaak, but it is no where near as deep as other card games like Magic or Culdcept. For the most part, there are only about a dozen things you can do and the game strategy boils down to combat order and oh... its random who goes 1st in each battle (so it seems, unless you get the drop on them via dialogs). The idea is you want to line up attacks and defense around enemy deployment but its not nearly as exciting as it sounds especially since you know what cards the enemy has before hand and there are so few strategies to use most of which deal with combat positioning.

    The biggest problem I have with the game is the intrusiveness of the RNG. Almost everything in this game is random. Quest generation, enemy spawns, rewards, combat (some of it), and map locations. I have had many encounters in this game that were ridiculous beyond belief for the level I was at and unfortunately there really is no way of knowing what to expect unless you just try it. This leads to a lot of metagaming and reloading which breaks the fun and immersion of the game. Remember this is not tactical game nor a traditional RPG so it has to rely on story and flow, it does not do that very well due to the randomness factor. I also hate how loot is random. In one game, i played almost 8 hours before seeing a weapon drop, but I had almost 20 shields. Again... very random and sometimes it really drags down the game.

    The graphics in this game are pretty atrocious and look like something from the late 90s. But the saving grace is that the game released at $20 so I wont knock the game for bad graphics.

    I think this game can be better. It needs work. It should definitely not be rated higher than similar games in its genre, but it is a slightly above average game overall (5 being average for user scores).    … Expand

Awards & Rankings

69
#69 Most Discussed PC Game of 2015
72
#72 Most Shared PC Game of 2015

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
73

Mixed or average reviews - based on 12 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 12
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 12
  3. Negative: 0 out of 12
  1. Pelit (Finland)
    Mar 31, 2016
    80
    Thea: The Awakening offers an entertaining combination of crafting and card games, but suffers from poor storytelling. [March 2016]
  2. Digitally Downloaded
    Feb 23, 2016
    70
    Thea: The Awakening makes for something of a grim, low-power 4X strategy game that works extremely well with its particularities. Proper planning can only take a God so far as adaptability and luck plays a major role with random events that could very well lay waste to everything. While that's not necessarily always good fun, what it does do remarkably well in building the tense atmosphere that is quite unique for the genre.
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  3. Games Master UK
    Feb 9, 2016
    70
    Ultimately, Thea's genre blend is a success, but basic, bare bones presentation and repetitious combat hold it back. [Jan 2016, p.80]
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