Fort Triumph Review / Test

Fantasy XCOM meets Heroes of Might and Magic in the new turn-based tactical strategy game Fort Triumph

The Zap Zockt Fort Triumph Review (German & English) – In this review, I introduce you to the indie strategy role-playing game Fort Triumph. It is a turn-based tactical fantasy role-playing game that mixes elements from XCOM with Heroes of Might and Magic RPG, turn-based tactics, and board game elements.

German Version:

This article is available here as text, but also as a YouTube video (German voice-over, many subtitles). This way you can choose how you would like to enjoy it most.

Video:

German voice-over, many subtitles

Fort Triumph Review – Intro

Hi there, this is the Zap. Welcome to my Fort Triumph Review. In this episode I introduce the game in detail, explain how to play it, and give you my opinion and a rating at the end. But most of all I want to give you all the information you need to decide for yourself if the game could be something for you or not.

I have received a free trial sample from the publisher, thank you for that. But this will have no influence on my rating because I always try to rate all games as if I paid the full price.

Game type – What’s Fort Triumph?

Fort Triumph describes itself as a mixture of tactical lap battle role-playing combined with world exploration and city building. This fits quite good. In the end, the game combines the basic features of different games, namely tactical battles like in XCOM and the exploration of a strategic 2D world map including city-building like in Heroes of Might and Magic.

We start with a small group of heroes and a very puny fortress. Then we send out the heroes to discover the world, find treasures, defeat enemies, or even conquer mines or other cities. In the fortress, we can gather resources, hire more heroes or research improvements that will make all our fighters stronger.

Fort Triumph – Background

The game is published by AllIn! Games and developed by the small indie developer team CookieByte Entertainment. It currently costs about 21 Euro at Steam, offers a single-player campaign that takes about 15-20 hours of playtime, and has different possibilities to start a free play.

As a special feature I would like to mention the couch-coop mode and the possibility to play the game together with friends via the new Steam feature “Remote Play” without having to buy the game as well.

Fort Triumph has been in early access for some time after a successful Kickstarter campaign and was recently released on Steam on April 16th. Now all campaign chapters, monsters, heroes, etc. are available. The game has received some updates during the longer Early Access phase, and we’ll see if this Early Access phase has helped the game or if there are still shortcomings.

Gameplay – campaign and story

Fort Triumph offers an extensive campaign, which is divided into several chapters. Here you start with given heroes, who also appear in cutscenes and dialogues in the fight frequently.

The story is a bit shallow and easy to understand, but quite amusing and friendly. The storytelling is not gorgeous, but absolutely entertaining.

What I really like is the way the stories are told. Unfortunately, there is no voice-over, but the texts are well written and almost completely well translated into other languages. And you can determine the reading speed yourself because the game pauses after each paragraph and it only continues when you press the mouse button. So you can also experience the story in round mode, which fits very well with the game and provides a relaxed pace. And if you like, you can also skip the texts completely.

About the story itself, I don’t want to say much now, not to spoil anything. But with about 15 hours of gameplay, you’ll get quite a bit of action here and you’ll also be taken to many different locations and have to compete against all kinds of different opponents.

Gameplay – Heroes and characters

Fort Triumph basically offers 4 types of heroes. There are paladins and barbarians as melee fighters, an archer, and a mage class as ranged fighters.

These classes exist in two sexes and with different appearances. The appearance is the same, only the hair is different, the clothes are colored differently and different names are given. But you can also train them differently during the levels so that two paladins can become more different over time. And the colors, names, etc. can be changed at any time.

However, every hero starts the game with one of the numerous passive characteristics and 3 skills. With every fight, they gain experience and advance in levels. With each level up, we can then decide whether we want to improve an existing skill or learn a new one. If we choose the latter, we can choose from three randomly suggested skills, which can also have different rarities. In total there should be about 80 different skills.

Fort Triumph Gameplay – turn-based Combat

The fights will take place in turn-based mode. Each hero and each opponent has a fixed amount of action points per round, which can be used on movements, attacks, used items, or interactions with the world.

The battle takes place on a limited map, which is generated procedurally. This means that not every battle on the same map is the same. Certain components and opponents are predefined, but the arrangement and starting positions are often quite different. This results in a certain replay value.

At first sight, the fighting system seems a bit simple, but after some getting used to it unfolds some deeper tactics. Because besides many different skills, the fighters also have the possibility to interact with the world.

This starts with the fact that they can climb over fences or enter houses through windows. It continues with the fact that fire skills can set things on fire that actually burns. And it ends with skills that can cut down trees, move rocks or tear down fences and buildings.

The game offers here all kinds of possibilities to physically turn the elements of the battlefield against the opponent. So we can drop trees or stone pillars on the heads of our opponents. Or we can kick them against a barricade or other opponents, causing damage and stunning.

The great role model XCOM is clearly recognizable here. And many things have been implemented very well, but somehow it doesn’t quite match XCOM. Especially in the presentation of the fights, Fort Triumph is a bit weaker.

So there is the possibility that heroes can be zoomed in when they make a special move. But unfortunately, the game uses this feature only very, very rarely. More complex camera movements and moves were programmed for it. But why they are not really used throughout the game is not clear to me.

The prerequisites for an action-packed presentation are there, the work on it was at least partly done, but then somehow not used properly. Unfortunately, this is wasted potential.

Gameplay – World

Between the battles, our hero team, or later possibly several groups at the same time, travels over a 2D world map. On this map we have our fortress as our main base, we can conquer more of them, but more detailed information is also available.

Each turn our group has a certain amount of movement points, so we can reveal the map using them. There we find items and treasures to collect. Some of these treasures or passages on paths are blocked by enemies. So we have to fight to free many of these treasures. But this is also good because this way our heroic fighters gain experience and improve their skills.

Anyone who knows the Heroes of Might and Magic series will immediately feel at home here. But the maps are much simpler. The original game simply offers much more different resources, more variations in mines, treasures, and other things you can find in the world.

Gameplay – Fortress

In the fortress, we generate income and with it, and with the resources found by the heroes outside, we expand the city more and more. Some buildings improve the city so that it grows even faster and generates more income, others bring improvements for the hero groups and city guards.

Here we can also recruit more heroes, or if we play without Perma-Death, we can bring back injured heroes for cash. With the new heroes we can build up new hero teams, so we can soon be on the road with several parties at the same time. But we should not forget that our fortress is also vulnerable, so we should leave some guards behind as well.

Unfortunately, Fort Triumph is not as complex as its role model in this area either. It would have been so easy to add more variants, more defenders, and more details, especially in this part. Unfortunately, some potentials are being wasted here as well.

Gameplay – tactical depth

Fort Triumph is a mix of XCOM and Heroes of Might and Magic. These milestones of strategy game history are great role models, a combination of both sounds very tempting at first.

But sadly, in some places, the developers either shied away from complexity or lacked something to integrate the diversity and strategic depth of the role models into their game.

In combat, important things like encircling, camouflage or surprise are missing, and in role-playing, with more equipment and a little more character values, more elaborate character design and variety, a lot more could have been achieved. Also, the Heroes part is only in a basic way in the game, here there would be much more, which could have upgraded the game, as the many different kinds of monsters of the original game, which you are allowed to add to your own troops there.

Fort Triumph is now a mixture of both games, but unfortunately only 60 % of each. In the end, it’s a nice and quite decent strategy game, but it could have been so much more.

It still remains a good middle class tactical game, but it can’t compete with XCOM in battles and it can’ t compete with Heroes in exploration and city building.

Gameplay – Coop and Multiplayer

But let’s now come to a very special strength of Fort Triumph, the multiplayer. The game offers here free-play with online multiplayer against or with steam friends and also a couch-coop game, with alternating input, Hotseat one called that in former times.

And as a particularly praiseworthy feature, Fort Triumph uses the quite new Steam function “Remote Play Together”. This feature allows the owner of the game to invite friends to play together who do not own the game themselves. And that’s what the developers impress me with.

Because with this function the whole multiplayer part is enormously enhanced. How often do you want to play a game with your friends, but they don’t have the game right now and don’t want to buy it extra for that. With Fort Triumph this is no problem at all, just invite, play along, done. There is no need to buy more than one game for multiplayer reasons.

And so Fort Triumph becomes a kind of board game for the whole family and the whole circle of friends, everybody is allowed to play. I think that’s really outstanding and great, and that makes the game something special. So a really big praise to the team on this point.

With this function you can not only play normal multiplayer games together, but also play together in the campaign. At least if you can both agree on the shared use of mouse and keyboard.

Screenshots

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

Technology, graphics, sound

Fort Triumph uses the Unity Engine So the worst teething troubles are off the table. It runs technically stable, I personally didn’t experience any crashes or hangs in more than 10 hours. But in the Discord and in the forums of the game you often read about players, who had problems with the stability. Whether this is due to the game or possibly to the computers of the players, I can’t judge.

Unfortunately, the game does not offer much comfort in terms of settings. So if you want to change the key assignment or maybe play with a gamepad, you’ll be left out in the rain here.

The 3D graphics in the fights are good middle class. You have a freely rotatable and zoomable camera, with which you can see the action from all directions. Maybe I would have wished for a little more zoom in both directions. Sometimes I would like to have more overview and often I would like to see my hero in very closeup.

And it’s not the problem that the game couldn’t handle it. Sometimes the attempt is made by more complex combat animations, zoomed very close to the characters, and special actions shown in slow motion. But this at the beginning very good feature was unfortunately only weakly implemented. The engine offers the option, most of the work for snappy variety was done, but unfortunately, it is not used enough. And if, then the camera movements are often not well-chosen and show only parts of the attacks or there are trees in the middle of the picture.

The 2D graphics of the world map and fortress are halfway okay, I’ll say. Here it seems that they couldn’t really decide if they wanted to use pixelart-retro style or modern graphics. The result is something somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, this doesn’t convince the retro fans, nor is it particularly nice to look at. You can identify everything and it’s completely usable, but much more ambiance would have been possible here, for my taste.

A big shortcoming is the completely missing speech output. Of course, you can’t assume this as a prerequisite for a small indie studio. But it would enhance the game, especially in the stories of the campaign. But it also works quite well as a text-based game, don’t get it wrong.

The music consists of some orchestra pieces, nothing earth-shattering, but it is at least on an upper elevator music level. The dubbing of fights, map, and whatever else makes noise is concise but functional.

Fort Triumph offers a total of 10 different language versions. The translation of the texts is very neatly done, at least for the German language. Very few text errors, almost no forgotten texts, all stories and tooltips are usable. Here one can applaud the team in any case. How good it works for other translations I can’t judge though.

Opinion and conclusion

If we sum it up, I get rather mixed feelings. The basic concept follows a very nice idea. The combination of a turn-based strategy like in Heroes of Might and Magic with the much more tactical battles of XCOM appealed to me and interested me right away. But unfortunately, this was then only half-heartedly implemented. They only put some of the parts of the two games together, and thus only scratched the surface. Many chances were missed to make a real top game out of this. Nevertheless, the game is fun to play, and in multiplayer it can fill evenings.

Technically, Fort Triumph has been largely flawless for me. But there is some discussion that this is not going so well for everyone. There are flaws in the presentation, both graphically and sound-wise, but not very bad. Some comfort features like the variety of settings and keyboard layout, gamepad support, etc. would have further enhanced the game. With a little more care and work on the details of this game, a lot more would have been possible.

The scope of the game is probably quite adequately described with “upper middle class”. The single-player campaign knows how to entertain me quite well and the multiplayer part is also realized really nicely. Here I would like to point out again especially the “Remote Play Together” Steam feature that supports this game. And I consider this to be a special feature of the game, which also has a positive effect on the quality of the product as a whole.

Rating

If we consider all this in relation to the price of almost 21 Euro/$, then I think the game in its current form is a bit expensive. 15 to 17 Euro/$ I would consider more appropriate. And that’s only if you consider the Couch-Coop and the wonderful Remote Play Multiplayer to be very uplifting.

In relation to the base price, I would like to give the game itself a basic valuation of 67 %. But this is increased by 10 % by the Remote Play because you can split the purchase for several players and it is not necessary that everyone buys the game. And together the fun of the game is also greatly increased.

That brings me to a final score for fans of round strategy games of 77% for Fort Triumph. If you get the game in a sale or otherwise cheaper, the rating will increase by up to 5%, depending on the discount.

Fort Triumph

Zap by Zapzockt.de

The Zap Zockt Fort Triumph Review – Test – Fantasy XCOM meets Heroes of MM – In the new turn-based tactical strategy game Fort Triumph a Fantasy XCOM meets Heroes of Might and Magic
In this article, I introduce the indie strategy role-playing game Fort Triumph. It is a turn-based tactics fantasy role-playing game that mixes elements from XCOM with Heroes of Might and Magic RPG, turn-based tactics, and board game elements.

Strategy

Graphics and presentation

Sound

Multiplayer

Price / Performance

Rating

If we consider all this in relation to the price of almost 21 Euro/$, then I think the game in its current form is a bit expensive. 15 to 17 Euro/$ I would consider more appropriate. And that’s only if you consider the Couch-Coop and the wonderful Remote Play Multiplayer to be very uplifting.
In relation to the base price, I would like to give the game itself a basic valuation of 67 %. But this is increased by 10 % by the Remote Play because you can split the purchase for several players and it is not necessary that everyone buys the game. And together the fun of the game is also greatly increased.
That brings me to a final score for fans of round strategy games of 77 % for Fort Triumph. If you get the game in a sale or otherwise cheaper, the rating will increase by up to 5 %, depending on the discount.

3.8

Outro

Did you like the XCOM-style turn strategy battles or are you more into reviving the old Heros style? Or is this turn-based strategy mix generally not suitable for you? Please write me your opinion below, I’m looking forward to discuss with you. More news, reviews and guides are available here at zapzockt.de . Then I wish you a great day, be well and stay healthy, ciao ciao, your zap

Links and Sources:

Steam-Link:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/612570/Fort_Triumph/

Fort Triumph Website:
https://forttriumph.com/

Fort Triumph Twitter:
https://twitter.com/FortTriumph

Fort Triumph Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FortTriumph/

Fort Triumph GOG Link:
https://www.gog.com/game/fort_triumph?pp=419d0e49e375f35f49f009174f87788e84f3ce8f

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