{"id":80026,"date":"2019-02-02T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-02T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/switch-eshop\/thea_the_awakening"},"modified":"2019-02-02T20:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-02-02T20:00:00","slug":"review-thea-the-awakening-a-flawed-world-builder-which-tries-to-do-too-many-things-at-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/02\/02\/review-thea-the-awakening-a-flawed-world-builder-which-tries-to-do-too-many-things-at-once\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Thea: The Awakening &#8211; A Flawed World-Builder Which Tries To Do Too Many Things At Once"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/bf931b3114e43\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/bf931b3114e43\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<div id=\"\">\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Thea: The Awakening Review - Screenshot 1 of 3\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/94847\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/94847\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Thea: The Awakening Review - Screenshot 1 of 3\" \/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Games developers love a bit of survivalism. We\u2019ve helped solo protagonists endure dangerous asylums. We\u2019ve guided grizzled duos through zombie apocalypses. We\u2019ve even kept entire households alive in more pedestrian fashion. But <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/thea_the_awakening\"><strong>Thea: The Awakening<\/strong><\/a> takes a very different approach to the whole concept, casting you as a god who must preserve their existence (and their power) by keeping a settlement of villagers alive. But as you\u2019ll discover if you pick up this unusual curio, there\u2019s far more than population management at play here.<\/p>\n<p>In a nutshell, that is Thea: The Awakening\u2019s greatest strength. A hybrid of many genres all somehow sharing the same space. And, in true cliched form, it\u2019s also its biggest downfall. When you begin, you can choose from eight different deities, each one with their own specific type of followers and traits they pass onto their acolytes. Mokosh is a goddess of nature, so her people are habitual gatherers and benefit from a series of bonuses as you level her up (such as gathering at a faster rate). While only two are accessible at the start, their base stats do facilitate some very different playthroughs.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Thea: The Awakening Review - Screenshot 2 of 3\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/94848\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/94848\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Thea: The Awakening Review - Screenshot 2 of 3\" \/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>When you\u2019ve chosen your holy form, you soon encounter the sheer number of ideas developer MuHa Games has crammed in here. There are no heroes to be found, no armies to build and unleash. There\u2019s a malevolent force called The Darkness (because being a vague antagonist means you\u2019re <em>almost always<\/em> called The Darkness), but you\u2019re not going to march off to its gates and give it what-for, <strong>Total War<\/strong>-style. You\u2019re just regular folk living a Medieval world inspired by Slavic mythology. It\u2019s a fresh approach, and one that plays directly into the sense of perpetual danger your people are perpetually facing.<\/p>\n<p>Everything is turn-based, so you only have a set number of actions you can perform per turn. You\u2019ll need to send out villagers to gather resources, or search nearby ruins for secrets and treasure. There\u2019s a 4X, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/sid_meiers_civilization_vi\"><strong>Civilization<\/strong><\/a> empire management aspect where you\u2019re juggling a rolling story about the world emerging from an age of terror as the gods slowly make their return while turning your settlement into a far sturdier hub of life. You\u2019ll need to make sure every villager is well fed and suitably healed, assigning items and jobs as you go.<\/p>\n<p>While the busywork of having to micromanage every single member of your community does start to get very repetitive after a while, the randomness of its storytelling does help add some unexpected spice. These encounters are card-based, similar in presentation and format to the scenarios of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/hand_of_fate_2\"><strong>Hand of Fate 2<\/strong><\/a>, where you\u2019ll \u2018choose your own adventure\u2019 in both peaceful and rather more dangerous missions. One second you&#8217;re exploring some ruins only to encounter some haunted skeletons, the next you\u2019re having a chat with a friendly mole.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Thea: The Awakening Review - Screenshot 3 of 3\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/94846\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/94846\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Thea: The Awakening Review - Screenshot 3 of 3\" \/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Those card-based mini-games certainly look the part, but much like every other part of Thea: The Awakening, they\u2019re over-complicated to the point that you\u2019re much more likely to auto-complete an encounter than be faced with deck-based affair that should be fun first and foremost. Perhaps it\u2019s a conscious decision to tap back into the \u2018survival\u2019 aspect of the game, but it just comes off as unintuitive at best.<\/p>\n<p>The problem Thea: The Awakening has is the meat of its gameplay becomes repetitive <em>very<\/em> quickly. Even with a small village, you\u2019ll need to make sure every settler is out gathering food, fuel or fighting monsters. Every one of them uses up both resources so you\u2019re constantly assigning items and sending them off to complete the same tasks. The survival element soon goes out the window as actual dangers are resigned to narrated encounters and card-based combat. It\u2019s the first time you realise that this is a game that\u2019s simply trying to be too many things at once.<\/p>\n<p>Usually, with a Civ-style 4X game, the real joy is in building up your lowly village into a bustling metropolis. The problem is Thea: The Awakening bottlenecks progress by making the most important resources unnecessarily difficult to acquire. There\u2019s a deep and vast crafting system in place, which uses the resources you gather from searching, combat and diplomatic encounters to create everything from armour for your warriors to new buildings and structures. The problem is, even on the lowest difficulty settings, you rarely have enough at your disposal to build anything of worth. The game simply gets stuck in a rut of its own making, and rarely finds a way out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"conclusion\">\n<h2 class=\"heading\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>Thea: The Awakening wants to be many things. It wants to be a proper 4X game; it wants to be a through-and-through survival experience; it wants to be an RPG, a CCG and many other genres all at once. It succeeds at some, but often at the expense of others. There are some really great ideas here \u2013 the almost Pratchett-esque silliness to some of its scenarios and the focus on Slavic myths serves as a striking source of inspiration \u2013 but the focus on micro-management busywork simply gets in the way of the empire-building fun Thea should really be embracing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Games developers love a bit of survivalism. We\u2019ve helped solo protagonists endure dangerous asylums. We\u2019ve guided grizzled duos through zombie apocalypses. We\u2019ve even kept entire households alive in more pedestrian fashion. But Thea: The Awakening takes a very different approach to the whole concept, casting you as a god who must preserve their existence (and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}