Review: Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan:: Comments on full campaign solo play with Nobleman and Shaman

by andstrauss

The use of the application is simple. I think that the application is a very good alternative to numbered paragraphs in a physical book. It makes the reading and choosing simple and straightforward.

The story is quite interesting, with some twists and and turns. It seems like the story branching is not very wide, mostly some NPCs will come or not; will go or not; will die or will be saved.

I really like the combat system in general. It's pretty simple and elegant. I particularly like the way to track enemy health. Low quantity of tokens on the board and when they are there, they are quite intuitive to understand what they are.

I understand that making balanced scenarios in this type of game is very difficult. Some combinations of characters and skills will make great combos and blow everything away easily, while other character combinations and skills will suffer to do mostly anything. I guess that Gloomhaven is really a rare gem in this regard. Most scenarios I played from Gloomhaven (and Jaws of the Lyon) were pretty balanced, even changing the type and quantity of characters.

The general "grand" architecture of the 3-4 fights before a rest zone is a nice change of pace. It seems it would demand some strategic thinking, but in my experience it did not turn out so. Playing with 2 characters, what happened with me was that, the characters were quite ready for the first fight, but depending on the difficulty of that fight, the characters would be either "in good health" or "pretty beat up and with a corruption card as bonus".

The corruption cards give a personalized touch and do give a sense of complications caused in the course of the game.

The side quests/scenarios are fun, varied, but doing them may lead to "poor health state" before starting the next "main quest line".

The Boss fights were all very interesting and I had to play every one of them at least 2 times to be able to win it. The last one, I had to play 3 times. I did not mind replaying those missions at all, as the bosses are different, challenging and powerful, but winnable.

Most scenarios can be won/lost and continue the campaign, but some scenarios are "win to proceed". The latter were not so much fun to replay. On one occasion, I just selected replay and clicked forward, forward, forward until the scenario ended and I selected to accomplish the win conditions.

I guess my major complaint about this architecture of several fights before a rest is that some fights were very difficult and I did not feel the option to flee and save resources (mostly health) for the next fight.
That was particularly complicated in the fights just before the boss fights. Getting very damaged during that fight, meant that the boss fight was going to be even harder than it would be. When available, I don't mind spending all the food/ replenishing resources I had to get in the best shape possible before a hard/boss fight.
In case you have to replay a mission, the app indicated to me to give another corruption, making things even harder.

Overall, I highly recommend this game for those seeking a lighter "dungeon crawl" system with shorter/medium campaign length. I'm looking forward to playing the Clash of the Immortals expansion.

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