Game Review: FATE: Undiscovered Realms

Released in 2008, FATE: Undiscovered Realms is the first sequel to the popular dungeon crawler FATE from 2005.

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Premise:

Slash, shoot, cast, and smash your way through the dungeons of Fate.  Find better equipment and level up to become more powerful and meet your fate.

Visuals:

Example of visuals

Visuals are somewhat dated.  The original FATE was made in 2005, and it seems there have been no visual improvements since then.  It doesn't look the nicest, but characters have a certain amount of appeal to them.

This being said, while there are many different dungeons to explore, they are all visually stagnant, and can get boring to look at pretty quickly.

Also, there are visual glitches galore, and you will often find your view obstructed by a weird glitch as pictured below.

I can't see my toes.

Sound:

Sound is generally very simplistic.  Sound effects convey what they mean very well and they make it easier to understand what is going on in the hectic battles.

Music:

Music is all made in low quality audio files.  This being said, a lot of the music is actually pretty memorable.

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Menus/Interface:

Menus are all well laid out and self explanatory.

The in-game interface is also reasonably self explanatory and highly informative.  If you for some reason don't know what a button does, it always has a nice tool-tip to remind you, and it usually has a hotkey on the tool-tip for easier access later on.

Controls:

Very simplistic.  Click to attack, click for everything.  The whole game can be literally controlled by using just the mouse.

This being said, while the whole game could feasibly be completed with just a mouse, there are hotkeys for most actions, so if you are more of an overachiever like myself, you will find the hotkeys to be a godsend.

Gameplay:

Gameplay is very simple to understand for beginners to the dungeon crawler genre.  It doesn't involve any weird confusing combos, and although there is equipment galore, it extremely simple and straightforward to understand from the start.  As I mentioned before, if you are unsure of how something works, there is usually a nice tool-tip to explain it to you in simple yet detailed terms.

While I enjoy the simplistic gameplay and the charm it provides, this can also be a downfall.  Combat tends to get a little tedious and repetitive at times.  Quests will change up gameplay a little bit, but not too much.

Spells are all interesting and fun to use, but using them in combat seems a little clunky.

Levelling up and putting points into character stats are also very simple and fun.

Also, one mechanic that I find encourages replayability after finishing the game is the ability to heirloom a single item to a descendant.  When you retire your character after finishing the game, you can choose one item to take with you from your finished character, and that item will receive 25% improved stats.  By doing this, you will be able to craft extremely powerful items by finishing the game multiple times.  It makes you want to see how powerful you can become after every time you finish the game.

Summary:

A very simple game to get into, yet highly addictive.  There aren't any gimmicks or frills to get in the way of the nitty-gritty dungeon crawling goodness.

• Pros:
• Very simplistic
• Reasonably memorable music
• Heirlooming items encourages replayability
• Extremely helpful tooltips
  
• Cons:
• Stagnant dungeon design
• Combat is sometimes too simple, and can get repetitive at times
• Graphical glitches can be a pain

SCORE:  8.5 / 10

Do you agree?  Let me know what you think in the comments section below!