f13.net forums - Fate: Undiscovered Realms - Wild Tangent

Fate is back, and this time it's twice as big as the original. For those of you who didn't play the original Fate, it's a cute little Diablo-clone with a young hero that adventures into evil dungeons level-by-level with his trusty pet. The pet can be either a cat or dog, but when you feed it different kinds of fish it will transform into spiders, unicorns, or other fantasy ass-kicking creatures. Undiscovered Realms expands on the first version by adding in 2 distinct dungeon towns with 2 separate heroic quests to dispose bosses in lower levels. The towns are Druantia, a forest town that looks like a Hibernia gone bad, and Typhon, which snowy and bleak. I know what you are thinking: "Oh, a woody area and a snowy area! That's freaking original." Hey, at least there are no fruity-ass elves and dwarfs running around, so cram it, Mr. Sarcasm.

Also, instead of just having kill and retrieve quests as in the previous Fate, this version adds escort, shrine attack/defense, and herding quests. For me, escort quests conjure bad images of Natalya Whats-Her-Name getting lit up like a Christmas tree in Goldeneye. However, in Fate:UR they just require you to get a monster to a certain level of the dungeon, not to a specific room of doom. The escorts follow you around and usually stay out of trouble, so it's not that bad. The Shrine quests are my favorite, though. In an assault shrine quest, you have to kill a glowing shrine while it spawns waves of monsters and attacks you with explosions and poisons. In a defense quest, you activate the shrine and kill off waves of monsters trying to destroy it. Both are very fun and a nice twist on the normal find-this-kill-x quests. I didn't get a herding quest, so I can't speak to those.

The good of this game is that it adds more depth to the first version of Fate, but it keeps the fun look, item-collection, and mass-killing that made the original fun. The bad, however, is game-breakingly bad. There is a massive bug in the game currently that renders your dungeon unplayable should it arise. The dungeons are randomly created, and at times the random generator tosses objects into your way with no regard for how you get around them. For example, the first time I encountered this problem, a weapon rack that I looted was blocking a single column hallway I had to get past. There was no way to walk by it to the next level. I had to create a town portal on the other side and then come back through to bypass the problem. Oh well, I thought, perhaps it was a fluke. It was not. In the 3rd level after that, I ran down a long hallway to find a giant stack of barrels completely blocking the door entrance. Behind this door was my quest objective monster. Those barrels shouldn't have been there, and they effectively cut off any chance I had at finishing that quest. I let out an audible, "Fuck this," and quit.

The Verdict: Rent/Demo it - try the demo to see if they have patched in a fix to the blocking bugs. I would have bought the game if it wasn't for that.