Tears of Avia

This was one of those games that left me confused with how I felt about it. I loved so many of its key ideas that I wanted to keep playing, but I was constantly battling its negatives. It’s not the best title in this category, but it’s also not the worst by a long way. At only £16.99 you get a lot of value for money, as long as you can forgive its mistakes. If you want a copy, it can be purchased here! Do I recommend it, I actually do! The positives just about outweigh its downsides, and most of them are cosmetic, so they can be ignored. If you play this, you must save the world of Estera from a power hungry demon. Can you gather your team and collect all the “Tears” before Vylenkine does?

There's a lot of depth to the combat and managing your party in Tears of Avia, whilst still remaining user friendly. However, while the effort put into the game's design can't be denied, it has a large amount of problems and rough edges. If you can get past the initial lacklustre visuals and pacing issues, Tears of Avia is a solid turn-based strategy world to explore.

Overall, I can’t recommend Tears of Avia at all. At the price of $20, there’s far more tempting offers on Steam than this. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, and it doesn’t do the things it borrows from other games particularly well either.

With sluggish combat and not much in the way of new ideas, it's hard to recommend Tears of Avia to all but the most hardcore tactics fans.

So unfortunately, there is a lot here that can't be overlooked. Even with version 1.02 having fixed some issues that were much more prominent in version 1.00, between some of the design decisions and just the sheer amount of crashes that I've had post launch date on two separate XB1 units... I really wanted to love Tears of Avia being a huge SRPG fan, but unfortunately between the issues and just the overall drop after the introduction, I unfortunately couldn't.

There's such a lack of polish and precision to Tears of Avia that it's difficult to blindly recommend. As a fan of the tactics JRPG genre, I did enjoy this, but it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that there weren't many other games out there with a similar ambition that are executed far better.

But sadly, at the end of the day I just can’t really recommend Tears of Avia to anyone else. Not being terrible is not the same as actually being good, and while I understand that this was made with love, it is ultimately a love that has little to nothing to add to the genre aside from being more of it.

Tears of Avia attempted to present a larger-than-life indie SRPG but bit off way more than it could chew. Creating a world that players don’t care about and a battle system that is broken after the first hour is a huge misstep for any title in this genre. There are some great ideas here, though. Character designs, animations, and writing make for some of the best moments, but all at the cost of an unmemorable adventure. Score:

Although Tears of Avia features lovely art, serviceable gameplay, and fun skills, it's such a mess of a game that it's difficult to thoroughly enjoy, especially when you reach its insane difficulty spikes.

Even with all of its faults you can tell CooCooSqueaky Games had a pretty big passion for making Tears of Avia. While it has all that passion behind it, it seems that they attempted to make something that was too large in scope for their team’s talent.