Thea 2: The Shattering Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Thea 2: The Shattering Free Download GAMESPACK.NET Thea 2: The Shattering is a fascinating game with no clear genre and lots of moving parts. Most of the time, it works – though it is a challenging game to get into. If you like tactical games and have the patience to try something new and different, Thea 2: The Shattering can prove to be a sometimes frustrating but also often rewarding experience. I was a big fan of the original Thea: The Awakening when it released. It was a flawed game, but the things it did right hooked me in unique and interesting ways. Thea 2: The Shattering attempts to recapture that strange mix of roguelike, card game elements, RPG, tactics, 4x strategy and more into this sequel. The original game had the benefit of sort of coming out of nowhere, while this sequel certainly has heightened expectations around it. We have a narrative steeped in Slavic lore – something I’m not particularly familiar with. That has its plusses and minuses, as it makes everything new and interesting, if not necessarily readily familiar and easy to pick up. You take on the role of a deity who gathers some true believers that struggle to survive a harsh world. TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

Procedurally generated world Each playthrough creates a unique world map with its own terrain, resources, and events.

You have elements of 4x exploration, right down to a hexagonal map with a fog of war that obscures the procedurally generated map until you move around on it. You can be a warmonger or a diplomat – though the former is a bit more straightforward, especially early on as you are learning the ropes. Thankfully the writing, the deities and really just the overall story are engrossing. Events feel weighty and important. That said, it’s worth warning that there’s some mature, rather dark themes here that might not be everyone’s cup of tea. In typical 4x / strategy fashion, things start out somewhat simply, but as time passes and the timeline grows – so do your options. Units can do a variety of things – but some are better equipped than others to handle specific tasks. Exploration is exciting, if daunting initially. Having the right unit for the right job is key as well. That’s not to say you can’t gather supplies with a warrior – but he’s built to fight not collect resources. Villages and islands are important to establishing a civilization, and finding new islands and discovering rare resources feels both challenging and rewarding when you pull it off.

Exploit the many wonders of the land – discover and combine resources, collect materials and craft them into your equipment.

hea2 has all the exploration components you’d expect from a 4X game: the fog of war, haunted ruins/goodie huts, diverse biomes, etc. Nothing too different there. However, one of the biggest changes from Thea1 to Thea2 is the map. Thea1 took place on a pangaea; Thea2 is an archipelago. Each island in the chain has its own unique biomes, native species, and resources. Players start on the “human” island with the Slavyans, Lightbringers, and possibly the Scavengers all the while having access to basic Tier I and Tier II resources such as coal, iron, bones, rubies, and dryad wood. As you gear up your group, you’ll want to branch out to other islands. This is done via ships! In Thea2, you’ll get to build ships out of wood, bone, and gems or by summoning it via ritual thanks to the new DLC. The higher tier of material you use to make the ship, the further it will go and the more weight it can carry. Arriving on a new island is a momentous occasion. Traveling the ocean can be harrowing (there are random events that can cost the lives of your characters), but success is celebrated with a popup that announces what type of island you’ve journeyed to and a certain amount of the special resource that can be found on the island. Gibbous A Cthulhu Adventure

Thea 2 The Shattering Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

For instance, if you travel to the Goblin island, you’ll get 10 Dragon Bones, which is a Tier III resource and very valuable. It’s like you’re a real explorer reaching uncharted lands for the first time. This card combat is based around action points, turn order, and using abilities to maximise the effectiveness and speed of your own actions while slowing down your opponents. It’s turn-based, but the game also keeps track of a ‘delay’ counter to decide which actions are resolved first. As the planning phase progresses, you’ll be given more action points to use, but also steadily increasing delays. You can save action points for more elaborate plays in later phases, but also risk taking a lot of damage first as a result. You’re also penalised for relying too heavily on one character, as repeating the same actions with the same character costs additional action points each time. Some encounters don’t give you a choice in which skill to test, however, so you might end up being forced to watch in horror as your scouting band of warriors headbutt each other to death over a particularly fiendish riddle.

Become a deity of Thea and direct your Chosen to victory in a world inspired by Slavic myth and folklore.

You can and will, after cornering yourself into unwinnable encounters, be forced to contend with the occasional party wipe. It’s here that Thea 2’s fiendish roguelike tendencies emerge from the whimsical waves of happy adventure, like a hydra from a fishbowl, and munch on your progress. Dead or otherwise incapacitated characters are gone forever. If your main character gets smushed, you’re given a chance to sacrifice two others to bring them back to life. If you can’t, or don’t want to, then that’s you finished. Combat itself is a tabletop card system, which is very en Vogue lately. You and your opponent each get two lines of four tiles to play cards on—attackers in the front, ranged party in the back. The cards are your comrades, each of which has attributes like life and attack power, as well as special abilities. There is a turn phase and an attack phase that takes place afterward. In the turn phase, you and the opponent take turns placing cards down until all your points are spent, then the game takes over and assigns hit damage accordingly. It’s a perfectly adequate, if perfunctory, gameplay segment that on its face fits the bill. Gigantosaurus: Dino Kart 

The world is alive with events that can impact your gameplay. These can range from simple resource discoveries to large-scale invasions.

Here’s where things break apart: the Switch port is painfully slow. Not “this has a tad too much loading time, ” or “the AI takes longer than I’d like to make their moves” long, but “this completely breaks my interest” long. The initial load times before you’ll hit the main menu are obscene. Eleven separate load bars have to be filled before you hit that menu, and it takes several minutes. The same goes for when you load your previous save. For the sake of this review, I started my play on Switch and moved to a PC copy just to get better acquainted with the gameplay without having to watch paint dry every 3-5 minutes. It’s actually pretty disappointing that Thea 2: The Shattering shoots itself in the foot on Switch. The world is unique and mysterious to me. There’s a ton of things to tinker with in the overworld sections, and the combat is engaging enough to mix things up. But this game proved to me what I didn’t want to hear — to me the inherent sluggishness of Thea 2 was enough to sink it. The learning curve here is real, however. For one, there is a heavy reliance on random numbers – which can make some encounters and events feel decidedly unfair. Especially if you find yourself on a bit of a losing streak with the numbers. Additionally, there are a lot of menus here. By and large they make sense once you’ve worked through them enough to understand how and why they are laid out the way that they are.

Play together – co-op mode for up to 3 players allows you to build your pantheon with friends.

That being said? It is a lot of menus and at least for me, the early going was a bit of a slog as I learned my way around them. Find some stop quality materials to build with and have a bit of luck in early encounters, and watching your people grow and flourish is incredibly rewarding. That being said, it’s pretty easy to die during the early stages and a few bad draws can ruin everything when your resources are so limited. In terms of the gameplay and progression – there’s a lot going on here. There’s a higher level meta game to manage, but at the same time you have to delve into the stats and numbers to make the most of your units and try to slant outcomes to your benefit as much as possible. This can feel tedious at times. Thea 2: The Shattering builds somewhat off of the foundation of the original – enough so that veteran players can more or less figure out what this sequel expects of them. That said? It is a new game with numerous changes that generally seem to work. Gladiator Guild Manager

Thea 2 The Shattering Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

At first, I didn’t like the islands. They made traveling difficult and having to traverse so far to get a particular resource seemed unnecessarily frustrating. The more I played it, though, the more I realized I was totally wrong. Islands are great! Thea2 is the first game I’ve ever played where going to a new land felt like an actual accomplishment. It’s hard, and making it there in one piece deserves to be celebrated. And it is! The announcement you’ve reached the “Dwarf Island” for the first time is rewarding – not for the extra Mithril you get, but because you know how much work it took to get there. Not only that, each new island is a complete enigma the first time you show up. That makes it threatening and mysterious. How often do you get that in a 4X game? For me, it’s rare. I never felt that way when discovering a new system in Endless Space 2 or sailing to a new land in Civilization V. For me, Thea2 nails the exhilaration of exploration better than any other 4X game I’ve ever played. Presentationally, they are a bit ‘chef’s kiss’ too. The 2D art is far superior to the menus and game world, presenting a cheeky, puckish cast of characters that you want to interact with. And the music is great: full of real instruments, strong orchestration and ethnic notes.

The next level that Thea 2: The Shattering exists on is a kind of operational, organisational level. Your characters need to eat, be outfitted with gear, and have their levels massaged into a useful state. At the start of the game, you choose classes for each of the members of your posse, and that has an impact on their various stats. Thea 2 has a nice penchant for avoiding the usual wizards, warriors and archers: you’re getting farmers, miners and blacksmiths along with the usual archetypes. There are oodles of stats in Thea 2: The Shattering, which brings us to reason number three for the tardy review. We just couldn’t face the number of dials and levers in front of us. We felt like Homer in the nuclear power station, desperately looking for the equivalent of a pecking bird to automate some of the simpler tasks. But this is subjective: if you are the type to lose yourself in loadout management, optimising teams for hours on end, then Thea 2 is your jam. Whether it was our mood or the accumulation of all the problems we already mentioned, we just couldn’t find the motivation.

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: Thea 2: The Shattering