At the core of every good game is a sense of direction. Sometimes, even when a game isn’t entirely to your tastes, you’re overcome with a feeling of “Well at least it’s exactly what it wants to be”.
Execution Error
Fractals of Destiny is constantly marred by this exact problem- I have no clue what it wants to be. Selling itself as a game made by lovers of both modern and classic RPGs, it presents itself as an action game where you play as Zerva, a member of the United Alliance.
It’s a fair enough layup for anyone not too nitpicky about the details- play as a facton of sci-fi looking characters with magic and swords and fight nondescript evil enemies. It’s not exactly pushing any boundaries but I don’t think it needs to.
Instead, the game’s flaws all come into how it’s executed. Sure, you can say Zerva is pretty but the moment the game gives you control of her you’d see that she handles like a sports car… after it’s hit a concrete wall at top speed. The game’s combat feels like a much slower Stellar Blade, as you have to dodge and weave through enemy attacks and hit them with combos.
Yet, it cares very little for making said combat actually feel good. Everything feels unnecessarily stretched out, from start-up animations to even the game’s voice lines. It’s unsettling in no flattering definition of the word.
There’s definitely some interesting ideas at play- the different hotbars for skills from Final Fantasy XVI makes its appearance here, and you even get a cool flying segment in the prologue where you tag in other members of the Council to fight off the game’s big bad.
But because you dodge with all the grace of the World Trade Center and are constantly trapped in situations that actively punish you if you try to do anything cool on time, the game just comes off as tedious at best.
Needs More TLC
To its credit I can clearly see how much the team at Krakatoa Studios love RPGs- they’d clearly set out to make something that pays homage to a publicly beloved genre. As I suffer through the game’s combat, there’s systems here that someone truly cared about. As you move on to new areas, the game will warn you about side quests that will lapse once you push forward. Heck, even the start of combat is clearly meant to echo random encounters.
Still, the problem is just how much of interacting with the game itself feels like a hassle. Even the controller support isn’t great, as you drag a mouse cursor through menus. I’ve joked about game reviews feeling like book reports, but in this case treat it more like a report card: this one needs a redo.
Final score: 4/10
Game reviewed on PC. Review code provided by publisher
