I've played and completed a lot of strategy RPGs. We're talking several XCOMs, 17 mainline Fire Emblems, and countless unique takes on the genre. I consider it my strongest genre. Fort Triumph is the sloppiest, most haphazard and arbitrary sRPG I've ever played. Characters being replaced with new units for story missions when they die makes sense since having certain roles present is required for the dialog to work—which it doesn't, but I'll get to that—but randomly replacing units in my full squad for story missions? How does that make sense? Why did no one second-guess the decision to kill off a character in a cutscene, potentially undermining your strategy by removing one of the pieces you had to work with during that map? In what universe does it make sense to allow you to target rocks with non-physic attacks, wasting action points attacking the thing an enemy is standing on because your mouse or controller cursor didn't click in exactly the right position? Who implemented enemies who explode when defeated and thought, "You know what? I'm not going to tell the player that this is a thing that happens. Surprises are always a positive thing!"
Fort Triumph recently came out of early access, and yet its current quality is more akin to what you'd expect from a game that just entered early access. Controller support is spotty; many tooltips either don't show up or get stuck on the screen and block any of the others from appearing. The audio levels are all over the place, with mage attack sounds being ear-piercingly loud compared to everything else (and the global volume sometimes dips for 5-10 seconds for some reason).
In theory, Fort Triumph should be excellent. A humorous fantasy XCOM with an emphasis on using the environment to get the best of enemies sounds like a great idea. It doesn't take long for the cracks to begin to show, however. The header image shows off the time that I was successfully attacked with a melee attack through a solid wall (which feels especially wrong in a game where cover is such a big factor and archers can't land shots without a line of sight). Using physical attacks to stun enemies and drop things on their heads is fun, but it's never clear how these abilities will work. For example, using an arrow ability that pulls an opponent toward your character sometimes causes them to careen down a line a full 45 degrees off of the angle you shot them from. Sometimes, abilities can break through walls. Other times, you use an ability expecting that to happen and nothing happens, wasting your turn and leaving you in danger. If there's a way of telling which characters and abilities can and can't accomplish things like this, the tutorial never mentions it. There's also no undo button, so you have to live with misclicks.
More than anything, though, Fort Triumph is endlessly dull. The dialog is written for three characters (maybe four—I honestly can't tell some of them apart), and new characters show up to fill these roles if someone is killed in combat, but the writing isn't interesting enough to justify the gymnastics. Like many indie games, Fort Triumph falls into the trap of being spectacularly wordy, with the result being that conversations drag and every character sounds identical. You can throw as many potentially humorous character misunderstandings into a conversation as you want, but when they all sound the same and no one has any actual character development, it just ends up being a lot of nothing. You can skip this, of course, but I can't bring myself to skip past anything I haven't already seen before because it feels like important information—such as "by the way, this enemy will explode when it dies, so maybe don't kill it with your low-HP melee unit"—might be hidden in there. Thus far, not so much.
I don't understand why Fort Triumph refuses to explain how basic things work. Sometimes, using a character's AOE fire spell causes them to also catch on fire. Does that happen when they're standing on something flammable? How can you tell what is and isn't flammable? Another question I have: why are maps randomized? I've found it useful to restart maps over and over again until I get a better starting position, and even if you don't do that, you'll have seen all of the first chapter's map types after maybe 15 minutes. Leaving the player uncertain about so many things doesn't strike me as being a good fit for a game where character deaths disadvantage you. Then again, characters surviving and being replaced anyway disadvantages you. And where do those new characters come from, anyway? These aren't advanced concepts. Fort Triumph just isn't forthcoming.
The first time I started playing, I lost all of my characters after missing something like 5 attacks in a row, all of which had a 80-90% chance to hit. That's possible, of course, but statistically improbable, and I don't trust Fort Triumph's programming much. This is, after all, the same game that suddenly added a map failure condition forcing me to keep a squishy mage character alive, only for her to be killed on the very next turn. She's supposed to be added to your party, but that never happened and she was helpless against her opponents. She was properly controllable the second time around, but long maps don't suit games where enemies can damage you through walls and a sudden bug can mean instant failure even if your units are still standing.
Fort Triumph needed at least another year in the oven. Standard sRPG options such as being able to see what your hit percentages will be before committing to a move are nowhere to be seen. Given how strange some of the angles are here, that's borderline unforgivable. And I know I brought it up already, but seriously—I can't be the first person to recommend an "undo movement" button. Movement spends an action point even if you don't use a full space worth of movement, so correcting movement mistakes can leave you unable to attack.
There's no earthly reason for Fort Triumph to be so overwhelmingly clunky considering that they've had years of feedback, but it is what it is.
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