Fort Triumph (PC) Review

Fort Triumph takes a very clear inspiration from the overworld part of the old Heroes series, and to great merit. This is largely a clone of the system previously described. Players move a group avatar around the map a set amount of spaces each day, choosing to interact with various points on the map. These can be battles, new equipment, resources and so on. This part is outstanding and very fun. The only major criticism is the resource model in this game has only two to manage: beets and magic. Beets function as a type of gold, and magic is a higher tier resource.

The reason it matters is it decreases strategic options - as in former games there was always a major choice of weighing various resources to go for. Here you simply get it and move on. Battles, on the other hand, take one out of XCOM's playbook. Players control a small group of four different hero types: paladin, barbarian, ranger and wizard. This plays exactly like XCOM, where each unit gets a few actions a turn, in which they have to move and attack. Each class of heroes has different moves it can learn, and typical aspects, like cover and distance, play into whether attacks hit.

One of the biggest differences is a type of "physics" attack. Every class has various attacks that push enemies or objects around. These are things like pushing a tree over onto an enemy, knocking them into a rock, or pushing them into each other. These attacks do decent damage, but more importantly they stun the enemy for a turn. It gives a type of puzzle element to each match. As for the heroes, each one, as they level up, get to select from a random collection of class skills, meaning even two units of the same type will likely end up different. Paladins tend to be tanky and supportive, barbarians hit hard and are in the thick of it, rangers tend to be more about moving units around and hitting from a distance, and mages are either outright damage or push-types.

Some criticisms are first that battles become a bit of a drag. Against random enemies there is not too much to do, as the strategy is generally always the same of whatever works for your team. The enemies you face do not really change much. When fighting other "heroes," the AI seems to get turned up big time, and it sometimes is exercises in frustration when a hero gets super-comboed from full life to dead in a single turn (with them then removed from your party). Other than this, battles take just a little too long, and lose a sense of being fun fairly quickly.

Other issues are how the art style needs some honing. Some of the characters look good, like the male paladin, whereas the female paladin looks very odd, with her portrait lacking arms. In battle the field is just a little too cluttered. Despite this, it does not matter if you are fighting in one ecosystem or another - they do not feel that different. Overall there is a small light-hearted story that is kind of fun to go through, and the game itself clearly has the basis of something that could be very good. There needed to be a little more time to hammer some things like the art, and combat specifically needs to be re-worked to feel less grindy. It has some great potential, and definitively should be watched in the coming months if some issues ever get fixed.