Reviews for Theia

[Greatfoxx]

Quite fun

Positive notes:

1) The puzzle aspect of the game is quite enjoyable with being able to
burrow undergroud and push rocks.
2) The artwork and music are both enjoyable
3) The movement and controls are simple and work smoothly.
4) First two boss fights were challenging and fun. Most games (Especially on
consoles are far too easy now).

Negative Notes

1) The last boss fight was rediculously difficult and not very fun. It came down to
constant dying just so that the order could be memorized. The worst thing
though is that at the very end it came down to button mashing. If your fingers
were not sore before that, they certainly would be after.
2) Just being picky with this one but the "Lives" aspect should be changed
to "Score Multiplier" as there really is no limit to how many lives to have.

Overall an enjoyable game definatly worth playing. Just needs a few tweaks to be really great.

[winterfire567]

Controls...

The animation work, story, and music are all wonderful. But as with a lot of games, crappy controls killed it for me. I found it difficult to navigate around obstacles, or in underground mode, to see where I was going. There is at least one thing you can do to fix this. Change the free-walking style to more of a grid-snap. This way the character won't get caught up on obstacles, and it won't make navigating nearly as frustrating as I found it to be.

Another thing I disliked about this game was the gauntlet of enemies on one of the levels. The control work made this pure luck and guesswork. Hardly a puzzle, in my opinion. If at all possible you should remove levels like this and throw in actual challenges, and not just mind-numbing frustration.

Overall, I give 6/10 because of the animation, music, and story. Better controls would have made this game much more bearable. (I didn't bother playing to even the first boss.)

[FuzzyRedPants]

Use arrow keys to move rocks?

This task is hard to do on a laptop...

[Zchacrea]

Puzzle free Puzzler

Pros
-Art was top notch. everything looked and moved smoothly. Pleasure to look at.
-Tunneling a nice touch.
-Addition of medals makes game have some replay value.
Mids
-Music was great, but each song was dreadfully annoying by the time you finally got through to the next track.
-Bracket story was okay. Needed some updates through gameplay.
-Deaths don't really add much since you can just continue, but allows for medals/achievements
Cons
-Many stages break down to running. To get past many groups of Bubbas you either run past them, or set them off, duck out of the way THEN run past them. Leaves for unimaginitive puzzles
-The "Puzzle" parts are either rudimentary or over complicated. The rock pushing solutions are basic When you have the Piggies, at times, there are so many (along with the perspective) that the puzzle is pure guesswork.
-2d movement in 3d environment with little room for error. Made running stages and 1st boss level unneccessarily frustrating

In the end the game was okay. Mildly playable, but not to be considered a puzzle/challenge. Most of the puzzles come down to trial and error, guessing, or running. The first boss level was a complete digression from the concept of a puzzle game as the slightest mistake tends to leave you to be spider food.
The game seems to confuse frustration for challenging. Then the levels don't progress in any sort of degree of difficulty. There are some levels that it takes one try for the attentive gamer and other levels require many replays before even coming close to finishing. This point is were the lives aspect becomes equally usefull and frustrating. While you are given a large number of lives, there is little difference between dying, reseting, and continuing.
For me, this game sits unhappily on the fence. Playable, but not the puzzle it claims. I rarely have lasting interest in games that just frustrate me, but there is enough here that I actually want to finish it. The reason I bumped it to a six, is because i love the animation when the character tries to tunnel into rock.

-Zhacrea-

[Bongafish]

Good, but...

*---Alright, first of all, the fact that you have lives makes zero sense, since everything you do is reset every time you die anyway (which I don't think should be the case, by the way; only when you hit Shift). There's no reason to care about losing your "last life". Puzzle games really don't need 'lives' anyway, unless you wanna make the player tear their hair out.
*---Like someone mentioned, the 3D looks nice, but it makes the two dimensional movement unwieldy and inaccurate. Either make the character move entirely freely and smoothly, or make him move in an obviouse blocklike pattern. The whole slow-walking tap-the-key-and-he-takes-several-step s-forward makes things tough. I hate when games do that. That make any sense?
*---Other than these things, the first 11 stages were fine, especially the last couple, which were fun and interesting to figure out.
*---But then came the first boss! It seemed like it was gonna be a cool chase until I realized that dying once brings me all the way back to the beginning. I suppose that would be okay if the stage wasn't entirely based off of trial and error alone. You almost *have* to die and memorize what to do, because the level consists of pushing up against the border of the level, turning and diving underground, hoping you made the right choice. If you didn't, you die. Start over.
*---Like the guy below me, I quit right on that level after I kept dying near the big cabbage patch after the maze part. For multiple reasons, that one part was extra annoying. Not in a challenging way. Just poorly designed.
*---The game looks like it got a lot of love in it, and it's interesting, definitely. Like the others say, you're on the right track. You just need to tweak this game some to make things work.