- Made by: WildTangent
- Cost: $20
- Where to get it: WildTangent Website
The gaming industry is one that loves to take the innovative ideas of others and bludgeon them to death with their own shoddy implementations. After Halo introduced the automatic-refilling health meter, for example, every game had to jump on the bandwagon. Earlier, when Sonic the Hedgehog showed the world that ugly cartoon animals could have ‘attitude’ and kids would love it, every single game developer had to make their own, culminating in the amazing brilliance of a duck with an extension cord sticking out of it’s arse.
FATE proudly continues this tradition by not just ripping off one or two key points, but the entire design docs of Diablo and Diablo II. More precisely, it takes ideas from both of those games, mixes them together and adds a few innovations. This kind of thing would be unacceptable were it not for 1) the fact that the Diablo series was brilliant and 2) FATE executes all of these concepts perfectly and sometimes even a little better than its predecessors.
You create an adorably diminutive character, choosing a name, gender and look and start in a village that happens to be right next door to a curiously massive dungeon. You’re given the task of going deep into the dungeon and taking out some baddie that lives there, presumably minding it’s own business. You delve into the dungeon, kill monsters, gain levels, collect loot and work your way towards being an unstoppable monster-slaying midget.
If this sounds a lot like Diablo, that’s because it is. The inventory system is the same, the controls are the same, even some of the sound effects are very similar.
Okay, so you know that it’s similar to Diablo. What sets it apart? Why should you pay 20 dollars for it?
FATE has a couple of neat innovations that I wish were in Diablo as well. The most significant addition is your pet. In a nod to NetHack, you can choose either a cat or a dog to accompany you in your dungeon delving. In the beginning, your pet is more powerful than you are and will help in battles tremendously. It also has an inventory, and you can load it up with loot and actually send it up to town to sell it all and return to you with the earnings. This helps cut out some of the back-and-forth drudgery that dungeon-hacking games tend to have. You can also feed fish to your pet that you catch to change it into different beasts, making it more powerful and giving it special abilities.
Another innovation is the lack of character classes. As a feature that is surprisingly deep for a ‘casual’ title, skill points are used instead of classes to define your characteristics. You’ll spend them on magic abilities, melee skills or other aspects of your character. You’re free to spend your points in any way you see fit. I made a dual-sword-wielding summoner and it was fantastic: I ran around the dungeon with two massive Orc cleavers and six Olwbear minions following me and attacking everything in sight. The flexibility available with this system is impressive.
There are many other cool little things about the game, like character retirement and the unusual way the game handles death, but I’ll leave them for you to discover. One of the best dungeon-crawler games ever is an indie game. If that is your kind of thing, this will be like heaven.
