Loria

If you liked Warcraft 2 and want to have some nostalgia but with better controls then this is your game! For there is a decent sum of similarity's to it. Be it with the looks and race. But the sounds and music is unique and fun! Along with the campaign, which YOU should surely try out and best!

A pleasant small game combining elements of Warcraft 2 and 3 gameplay that is now free and can offer relaxing small breaks from work. Personal suggestion, the base game can be expanded and developed greatly with content updates or an expansion instead of a Loria 2. Wish luck to the developer for all future projects!

I'm the voiceover guy who did all the voices for all the 'male' voice range characters. About 25 in total. It was super fun. Special nerd love because I was obsessed with the Warcraft games.
-Alexei Ryan

weird clone of Warcraft 1,2,3. could be a good game, but constant crashes on missions with multiply basses order last mission and chaos mission 7, very bugged pathfinding makes units stuck. AI cheats with unlimited gold. Better play original Warcraft 1,2,3.

I regret not reading the reviews more thouroughly before buying. The game does have nice Warcraft 2 vibe. They claim the game is with "..with modern spin on controls and user experience". That is only partially true. Unit pathfinding is still as bad as it was in Warcaft 2 (sometiems even worse, the units get stuck and cannot move). Units get stuck if you issue commands to quickly etc.

Story is not bad but the missions itself are quite boring. You basically just destroy enemy bases or defend for some period of time.

The game is also quite difficult. It is definitely not a relaxing RTS. You need to conquer your enemy and expand very quickly or you'll run out of gold. Enemy usually have multiple bases that reinforce each other (most of the time).

Even on Normal the AI is very aggressive and always optimally targets your damaged units and uses the proper counters. Every engagement is challenging and you will need to load often as one lost battle many times means lost missions due to lack of resources (especially gold). I have requested a refund and got my money back

Nope, it's just nostalgia cash grab. First of all, this is complete WC1/WC2 ripoff. They tried to clone is as much as the could without getting sued. I don't mind it that much and it was their goal to clone old school RTS gameplay but they could have been at least slightly original in graphics department. As for gameplay, you get what you pay for. An old school RTS gameplay but here again if its just a clone of actually good games so I expect gameplay to be cloned flawlessly. Nope, pathing is not very good, units get stuck and cannot unstuck quite often. There are few other bugs too.
Honestly, with all above in mind I cannot think of any reason why would you buy this game instead of original classics on GOG...

It's a pretty solid game and hitting the old RTS nostalgia feels.

The campaign mode isn't too bad... you are able to choose your difficulty. However, if you try the hardest, prepare yourself for long dragged out scenarios. The dialogue is kinda cheesy (if you are into that) and the story a bit cringy (again, if you are into that).

Gameplay is good but not without bugs. The main ones you need to look out for is a few path-finding issues like getting stuck in walls or deciding to go the long way around. (TIP: If a unit is stuck, try move spamming them away from the wall or quick-save then reload). Another one is don't save while a building is in construction. When you load the save state it doesn't record the building and you lose your resources for it.

One mechanic I liked and want to point out is that most units can level up. This made me deliberately protect high levelled units over others to try keep an advantage. Furthermore, I would try and time the level up in order to restore the unit's health back in a fight.

The sad thing about this game is that there is no multiplayer yet. Hopefully the game gets an update to make that possible.

There is no modern spin on controls and user experience... It feels and plays like an old game with all the flaws. The design is quite lazy, predictable and boring. I managed to finish 3 missions of the campaign and unfortunately I was bored to death despite the fact that I love RTSes.

An exceptionally well made throwback to old school RTS games with some modern tweeks. The humour is great, gameplay fun and uncomplicated and the interface and UI is very clean and simple.

I would love multiplayer even if it's just LAN / peer to peer.

Great job to the dev!

I love RTS games, I remember my dad bringing home WarCraft 1 when I was a kid and I've played nearly every one I could get my hands on. This games is a throwback mix of WC2 and WC3 with traditional unit design, hero units like WC3 as well as WC3's economic model. The writing is probably the game's strongest point, it is so tongue and cheek and hilariously well written. The visual design is clear and easy to read and the two factions are distinct enough.

Having said all that, and there is a lot of good, I cannot recommend the game. There are two big reasons for that. The first reason is the pathfinding and unit AI. I know this is a throwback to an older time but units behave even worse than they did back in the early 90's. On any map with ramps I knew I'd be in for a slog because the pathing is just so bad that you'd never get your army up the ramp in a timely pace. I lost many a map (especially the final missions of each faction in the campaigns) when my maxed out army was waiting to engage and I give the order and they'd either studder step, get caught on edges, not move at all and by the time it was all over my army was slowly bled out because they couldn't get up the ramp. Ramps, and possibly your own units, are a bigger enemy than the actual enemy.

The second issue is the mission design. While there are a few fun ones with ally AI that you need to time your attacks together but for the most part each and every mission has the same plan "max out, destroy one enemy base. Remax and repeat for the next hour." It is, again, a nod to the design of the older games but that doesn't make it fun or well designed. Most missions were me just waiting to get maxed out so I could go destroy a single enemy base (most later missions feature 3-4 bases), attacking and then waiting again to remax.

I love the homage to older games, the writing is probably among the most fun I've heard in a game in years, and the graphics are tight but I can't recommend the game because of those two big issues. I wanted to overlook them, I tried, but each game I started up I just felt dread that I would be wasting my time and that I'd be frustrated. It isn't often that I feel like I don't ever want to log into a game again, and Loria isn't all bad, just the experience is so hard to deal with I don't think I will try it until a patch hits.

Value metric: Does it have a value of $1 per hour of gameplay? Yes

Like most RTS old school gamers I enjoyed Warcraft II back in the day, so this tribute to Blizzard’s masterpiece is a pleasant journey to the past. If you enjoy traditional real-time strategies and don’t mind cover versions sounding almost the same as the originals, give Loria a try. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1670622159 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1674484692

This is really a fun game. I'm playing it on Linux and it runs quite well with the exception of few bugs I experienced like pathfinding by units.

When Warcraft is familiar to you you will love this game.

System:
openSUSE Leap 15.0 (with Kernel 4.20 & Mesa 19.1-devel)
AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 8GiB
32 GiB DDR4
Ryzen 7 1700X

Loria is a love letter to Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. Here's my review of the campaign:

Pros:
*Main character for the Order campaign, Dalt, has more charisma than any Warcraft character has ever had. Seriously, his personality and voice acting are fantastic.
*Game is decently balanced. Order has better heroes and has Clerics, whereas Chaos has tougher melee units and an overpowered endgame flyer in the Manticore. Chaos feels stronger overall, but not by much.
*There's decent mission diversity; go in and destroy the enemy bases, defend for X minutes, as well as a few missions where you need to carefully control a squad of units without a base. Difficulty is well balanced too.
*With a few exceptions (*cough* Corpse Explosion), hero skills are useful and fun to use.

Cons:
*Item system for heroes looks like it was added as an afterthought and mostly just offers some small stat boosts, there's no real depth to it.
*Quality Assurance drops down as you advance in the campaign, with the english getting somewhat more broken, and the quality and quantity of story and dialogue dropping sharply
*One significant balance pain point is towers and siege units; they're both pretty overpowered. In the first Chaos mission, where you don't get siege units and need to take down a base with towers, the only way I managed to succeed was by building offensive towers of my own, because my units were simply incapable of handling both the enemy units and the enemy towers together.
*The main Chaos hero has no personality or charisma and is a giant drag to play as after the delight of playing as Dalt in the Order campaign.

Verdict:
Loria is very much an indie title. If you play it through to the end, expect to see a fair amount of broken english, some small but significant balance problems, as well as some annoying bugs, like how buildings get cancelled and you get no resources refunded if you load a game where a building was in construction. In my case I even encountered one game-breaking bug which made me have to restart a stage because the stage objectives failed to load, and after destroying every single enemy building I realized I didn't have a win condition.

If you can look past those flaws, and you loved Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 like I did, I recommend you give this game a try. It scratched an RTS itch I had, and that's enough for me.

Hello RTS my old friend

This new RTS is openly a shout out to the great RTS games of old and it shows in what for me as an extremely fun game.

My only criticism with this game is that the asking price is high; I fully understand that indy games have limited budgets and sometimes it is better to see if the game will sell well before deciding to create servers for multiplayer (and sometimes it isn't even a choice) but I fear that the developers created a catchj 22 for themselves

Now being honest about the review I love Warcraft 2 and I was shocked by the game not feeling just like Warcraft 2 and think these really did make it feel more original than expected.

1. There are autocast spells which is something that never existed in Warcraft 2.

2. The roster is rearranged in a way that makes the factions play differently. For example in Warcraft 2 it was Knight-Paladin Paladin had healing and you had to order each heal. Now there is an autocast on a weak elven priestess making it a different feel. The Knight also shows up later without any spellbreakers making the swordsman more important. I won't bore you with every detail but the new roster makes the game feel more original.

There are more details but I thought I was wasting my money on a little nod to old rts games when this game feels a lot more original than it is. The Warcarft influences are obvious which is why I was pleasantly surprised by the new feel.

I would charge less for this but at the same time I can't deny having fun in a silly world.

Fair warning: I've never written a review before.

Phew - no.

First and foremost: I love RTS games, I earned my money playing them and creating content for them, I enjoy to play them and I love grand fantasy stories which is why I always take it with a grain of salt that most of the better RTS of recent years have been in sci-fi/modern era settings.

The trailer for Loria came along and I was interested - the graphics weren't necessarily what I would have liked but the whole thing was charming enough.

I bought it with the launch discount, which gave it a very fair price and just finished the campaigns while travelling with my old-ish laptop.

Gameplay
The basic mechanics work alright, you can select up to 24 units, there's attack move, you can tab through your units. The devil's in the detail:

The pathfinding is alright as long as there aren't any ramps, rivers, trees, fences, fairies or pebbles in the way. Especially on later campaign maps your units just tend to run around aimlessly, get stuck on the ramp, inside of each other (not as exciting as it sounds) and seem to be unable to move.

That you can tab through your units is awesome and something I'm very used to. What I'm not used to is that units like Knights, that have no active abilities, are in the second slot while spellcasters like Clerics are in one of the last slots. Other games do this very intuitively where the spellcasters are at the front.

The hotkeys for your heroes as F1 and F2 is traditional. What isn't traditional is that your hero doesn't get selected for immediate use when he's in your current control group. (i.E.: you have your whole army with 10 units and two heroes selected. You hit F2, the camera centers on your second hero but you can't use his abilities because the focus window is still on your first hero).

The hotkeys in general annoy me as well - I don't want to hit P for Peasant, I want to hit Q for the icon in the upper left corner. I understand that this might be not as important for many players, but I thought I note it (and the fact that you can't seem to customize your hotkeys either).

That your units promote with enough XP to deal more damage and be sturdier is a good thing, but as soon as they promote they also heal back to full which, coming back to air units, makes for tons of hilarious situations where you can raid the enemies workers to heal your units back to full. It also makes for weird and powerful swings when a hero dies since that often triggers plenty of level-ups for the units that were around for the kill, healing them back up to full in the middle of the fight.

The AI is servicable for the most part, it rebuilds what you destroy (mostly exactly where you destroyed it, often while you're still there) and doesn't seem to cheat as far as I could tell, so that's a plus. It does, however, fall apart completely against air. With the mixture of pathing issues for it's units and the fact that it often trickles in units as soon as you're in range and pulling in units like catapults to defend you can trivialize most content as soon as you get some flying units on the field.

Finally there are some minor annoyances like why isn't there a display for how many workers are in a goldmine, why do I get an audio cue "Research complete" but can't see what it is, units stopping their current attack when you give another attack-move, air units awkwardly teleporting a few meters every now and again and so on and so forth.

But overall: still servicable, enough to let me enjoy a decent story but it feels like a chore to play. If this had multiplayer then I would have a hard time to bring myself to wrestle with mechanics that cumbersome game in and game out.

The campaign

Oh boy. You decide to stay away from multiplayer: understandable, you're up front about it, why not.

The campaign starts out decent enough: the intro video is great, giving the main protagonist a bit of a funny / macho vibe works well enough and the first missions are interesting enough with a bit of banter, some units straight out of Warcraft and so on.

But the whole thing quickly gets a little disjointed: practically every mission ends with you destroying the last building/killing the last unit, cut to black, campaign map.

Warcraft 2/3, which this game has taken 85% of it's everything from anyway, does this much better: there are some final words from the heroes, the overall story gets moved forward with some text on a scroll that gets read to you, it manages to inspire a sense of greatness and the fact that you ARE shaping a fantasy world, that this game ... has a hard time achieving. The dialogue is almost nonexistant after the third mission, even after the first one it gets very sporadic.

For example (mild spoilers):

the 7th mission of the human campaign has you fighting an epic battle against several enemy bases. You destroy the last building, the score board pops up, you go back to the campaign screen where the next and final mission is selected. It has a one-liner as a description, you hit play and you land on the map with the objective "Destroy the red base" in the upper left corner. That's it. That's all the suspense you get for the final confrontation of the game.

Or someone agrees to help you, your ally is uncertain if they can be trusted, 2.5 seconds later they prove their trust - any further comments? No. Some knights come charging in, old friends of the protagonist showing up to hunt him down. You defeat them. Any words on that? Nah, you slaughter old friends wordlessly and just carry on.

You come back to defend the capital, you charge in to help out the rallying defenders of the city. Any comment on that? Nah.

There are several months of war waging between your faction and the enemy faction. How is that explained in game? A single sentence. A SINGLE sentence.

The game shows that it had great voice actors and a decent idea to get a unique story off the ground. The game even shows you in the first two missions that it's able to react to certain situations with some hero chatter, to spawn units and so on - it just got abandoned after a small taste of the whole thing.

Final thoughts

The decision to skip multiplayer should have led to a tight single player campaign. Sadly that isn't done with slapping together 8/16 maps, adding 10 lines in the first two missions and then just make me kill base after base whose most notable increase in difficulty is the fact that my army is almost incapable of traversing any ramp.

Some minor thing like skirmish only on 5 maps, the cumbersome control issues mentioned earlier and smaller annoyances just pile up to make me not that interested in the game.

Overall I can't recommend this game but I have high hopes for the developer. I always appreciate a newcomer to the genre, the basic ideas were great (even if scavenged from certain other games) and I think that they'll achieve good things if they can get someone on-board that keeps the campaign engaging throughout.

And most importantly: those guys managed to finish a game and put it out there, something that is commendable in itself.

Excellent game if you are looking for a classic RTS experience. The game feels like Warcraft 3 done on Warcraft 2 with some extra cool features like troops that can level up and much more!

Worth a buy for the nostalgia. Still needs a bit of polish (tree felling doens't leave a mark - I wasn't even sure the trees were being removed initially). This is a decent approximation of Warcraft 2, though lacking the charm (this game doesn't take itself too seriously whereas Warcraft did at the top level, though the humour was there below). Not sure if there is a map editor - there needs to be really if this is to really fly.

The campaign seems quite well designed (I've only done a couple of missions) with a mixture of traditional base buiilding and more hero-led missions. Hero units exist but are not as central as they are in Warcraft 3 (battles don't revolve around the heros with their death being in many cases the end of the battle).

Two factions so far, hopefully more will come in the future (though as an homage it is correct considering only Alliance and Horde existed in Warcraft 2).

I'm hoping that the developer has a successful launch and that they are able to continue to work on this.

Loria is an RTS game in an age where the genre is mostly centered around Starcraft and Warcraft, two extremely old blizzard games. Loria wears it's inspiration on its sleeve, looking, sounding and playing very much like an updated Warcraft 2, and for that, I love it. It really does stratch the nostalgic itch that I had for that game. It might be similar to Warcraft 2, but it brings a lot of modern inprovements, such as being able to select a total of 24 units rather than 9, pathing improvements (although it still feels very Warcraft 2 like).

The campaign so far, (I'm only 3 levels in so keep that in mind) has been fairly easy going, in the sense that I have not been instantly crushed by an AI that builds and gathers resources 3 times the speed of sound like in Warcraft 2. It is still challenging, don't get me wrong, but so far the level of challenge has been just right. Dalt is a fairly interesting character in just how full of himself he is. This is clearly not a game that takes itself seriously in the slightest.

Skirmish mode only has a few maps, however the Developer has said that more are coming, and I look forward to seeing that they are like. The 2 I have played so far are decent maps, although the first time I played I got stomped (user error, not game error), so I have not had a proper look around yet. I can't speak for the Meta of a single player game, but the maps so far seem balanced enough for my tastes. The AI seems fine as well. At least for captain rubbish-at-video-games over here.

The Two factions, Order and Chaos, also take a lot of inspiration from the Humans and Orcs of the afformentioned games. Order has access to a lot of human and elven (called Fey in this game), from the fast and damaging knights to the hyppogriphs that can be ridden for ranged support or anti-air, to the magical flying gunboats for both anti-air and siege. The fairly demonic looking Chaos troops are similar, but their main difference is in the unique upgrades and spells. For example, the Order have a farly good healer in the form of the cleric, meanwhile Chaos prefer to raise their dead troops into skeletons. I tend to prefer Chaos (Manticores appear to be extremely powerful), but both sides perform well. The Heroes do fairly ok as well, with inventories for carrying usable items or passive benefits, and their special abilities are generally useful to certain situations. The heroes don't seem as tanky as in Warcraft 3, however with this game you have the added bonus of assigning their attributes like in Diablo, with 5 points per level, rather than the forced attribute gain in Warcraft. If you want a Tanky Mage/Necromancer, you go right ahead. In that sense, I kind of prefer it. The Heroes are a bit more flexible.

It will take some time to get used to certain things. For example, the Attributes do not have hover over tooltips, so you will have to figure out what they do yourself. Doesn't take long to get a basic idea, but a little pop up stating exactly what it does would be a nice addition. Same with the Attack damage and Armour. The infomaniac in me wanted a little more information on what each type of attack was good against, how effective the armour was etc, but like I just said that is more a personal preference thing. The UI in general serves it's purpose well enough. Although apparently improvements are on route, so I will see what that brings. (EDIT 20:43 28/11/18 : The UI Improvements have been added, and the Attributes, and Attack and Armour areas now have all the information I wanted. Thanks Dev!)

One minor gripe I had is the with the Unity Launcher. If you wanted to change the controls, they are all mislabled, and you have to do it in the launcher, rather than having a dedicated part of the options menu (unless I am blind and missed in, in which case I will be happy to correct myself). I am not too familier with completed projects in Unity myself, but it might be worth either adding a proper options menu entry for it, or changing the labels in the launcher.

There are also a few typos, grammatical errors and spelling errors here and there in the english translation (comming soon instead of coming soon in the maps list for example). Though this doesn't take away from the overall experience and I still get the idea of what is being said. Keep in mind that the Developer doesn't appear to be a native english speaker (Judging by the Slovak Arts council thing on the main menu), so don't hold it against them.

Overall. I think the game, even in its current, just released, state is a fun experience. It definately captures the feel of its inspiration, and despite a few minor issues that don't really detract anything (the one bug I have encountered, where my worker got stuck in the building it just constructed, has been fixed already according to the update log,) its a decent purchase for any fans of older RTS games. Good work Developers, and I look forward to those improvments and new maps.

Loria is essentially a Warcraft 2 tribute, but it also borrows a few ideas from Warcraft 3, such as hero altars and auto-casting. Each of the 2 factions has 3 playable heroes that can gain levels and unlock new abilities. You can even fight neutral camps around the map that will drop different artifacts, pretty much what we had in Warcraft 3. Since the game does not have a multiplayer at the moment, you will have to rely on the single player campaign which is relatively enjoyable. It has a skirmish mode but it does not have many maps, and there is no incentive to practice without PvP. I actually think that voice acting is pretty good, considering that it's RTS game from some indie dev. Most of the units and heroes have some voice lines, and they are not as cheesy as you would expect. Overall I would say that this game is probably better than the original Warcraft 2 - kind of the same but more complex.

Actually, the last time I played Warcraft 2 was probably 20 something years ago, playing the campaign on my PS1 XD (yea back when people played RTS on consoles). If I recall correctly the factions in Warcraft 2 were basically identical aside from some active abilities; Loria's factions are very similar but there are some slight differences in terms of stats and spells (and unique heroes obviously). I would say that Loria has a lot more potential for unique PvP builds if the developer manages to add ranked multiplayer. So far this game has a nice variety of missions: surviving until time runs out, using a limited amount of units to clear the map, and generic base vs base RTS gameplay. For the most part, the UI is tolerable, although there are some tiny problems like the lack of information on stats. The only part that I dislike is the detail in the environment, the units and buildings look good, but some of the scenery pieces look like they came from a different game. The art style is not consistent, although I do like the music.

Pros:

Cons:

TL;DR:
A solid homage to early RTS games such as Warcraft 1+2 that also borrows ideas from later RTS games. Kinda like a lovechild between Warcraft 2 and 3.

Great game if you grew up with those oldies and you like being nostalgic... but it might fall a bit short if you've never played any of these old games back then due to things such as janky mechanics, which are completely normal for games like this. (terrible pathfinding, units getting stuck, etc.)

Performance & bugs:
Thanks to the nostalgic look, this game does not require a powerfull system to run and I personally did not encounter any game breaking bugs yet. Others have, but that's normal. Depending on your operating system and hardware, user specific bugs can occur in any game. Still, the developer is paying great attention to bug reports and suggestions and is working hard to fix them all and make improvements when the demand is reasonable.

Gameplay & Design:
It looks, sounds, feels and plays just like Warcraft 2, but with a nice HD update. Units can get clogged up every now and then due to the pathfinding that is normal in 2D RTS games. Loria also brings some convenient improvements from Warcraft 3 which include but are not limited to: auto-cast, chain commands, valuable but far from overpowered heroes & more! The two races are balanced and very fun to play. Personally, I like Chaos alot. The AI is weak and slow on easy and medium difficulty, but really shines on hard with aggressive behaviour, dedication to expansions aswell as relatively big and diverse armies. I haven't played campaign yet as I usually avoid story modes in favor of skirmishes in games that offer such a mode and I'm having alot of fun with said skirmishes. Right now there's only a hand full of maps: three 1v1, one 2v2 and one 3v3 but more maps are soon to be added! As much fun as I'm having though, I don't expect a huge, competitive community to evolve around this game as it's targeting players that have played classic RTS games and those that know a good game when they see one. =)

Things I would like to see in the future:
- Item shop has been added by now. √

- World Editor has been added by now. √

- More tooltips have been added by now. √

One or two more heroes for each race would greatly improve personal preferences and add more diversity to strategy and combat! Adding neutral heroes would work aswell, similar to the tavern from Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne.

You can see walls in trailers and screenshots, but you cannot build them yourself. This is something I would very much like to see in Loria! Many classics gave you the option to build walls, but this somehow died out with newer RTS games.

Conclusion:
Absolutely recommended for fans of classics from the 90s such as the Warcraft series or even Command & Conquer / Dune 2000. But that's rather obvious, isn't it? If you like those games, you'll like this one aswell. However... if you've never played those games because you missed them or are too young for them, you might still find some joy in Loria because it's a polished version of those older games with some quality-of-life improvements and is a good way to be introduced to the old RTS era.