Fort Triumph (2020)

Playtime: 14h55m (campaign completed on Easy)

Intro

Fort Triumph is a turn-based strategy game with combat very similar to XCom and a land map with cities and enemies like in HOMM. Your parties travel the land fighting enemies for loot, while you play through the story and upgrade your cities/heroes.

What makes Fort Triumph unique is the heavy focus on using abilities to move objects and units. You can use this to knock trees/rocks down onto enemies, stun them through collisions, dragging them out of cover, knock them off ledges or trigger attacks of opportunity.

The Good

• The physics-based abilities are a ton of fun and allow for some really clever tricks. I wish more games had this.
• The dialogues are quite funny, especially the mages obsession with research.
• The story has some solid twists.
• Easy difficulty option.
• You can auto-win very easy battles.
• Items can freely be moved between parties.
• No inventory limit (looking at you, Dragon Age Origins).
• No time limit (looking at you, HOMM3 campaign).
• No wiki-ing required (looking at you, AOW3).

The Bad

• The game shows multiple other map and race options at the start of the campaign, but none of these work. I guess it was abandoned?
• Only four classes and most other playable races are just reskins.
• No wiki or other outside information available (i only had 2-3 questions, but still).
• The game sometimes resets the video resolution at the start of battles.
• Recruitable heroes too often have negative abilities.

Conclusion

Based on the graphical style and the Steam reviews i expected this to be mediocre, but it's actually really solid. The combat is just so much fun. Park melee units next to an enemy, then use a knockback arrow, whirlwind spell or kick to move them to trigger attacks of opportunity. Use spells to bundle up units then launch a fireball. Drag an enemy out of cover with a grappling arrow, then launch them back into allies or walls.

One time i couldn't see an enemy in cover behind a tree, so i used a knockback arrow to knock a rock into the tree, making it fall on the enemy. It really is like a billiards game sometimes. I never had this much fun with the combat in XCom.

If you like small-scale turn-based battles and knocking things into other things, do yourself a favour and give Fort Triumph a try.

This game has everything I look for in a game. Great graphic...check. Theme in my wheelhouse....check. Comic writing....check. Decent controls....check.

But for some reason, every time i try to play this game I get frustrated and just shut it off fifteen minutes in.

The only thing I can identify as a flaw is that there may be too much writing and not enough gameplay.

At the end of the day, the game itself isn't bad, but I just keep bouncing off of it and there's too much else to play to spend my precious gaming time being frustrated.

~David.