Fort Triumph is a game entirely at odds with itself. Its campaign has a story with set characters, but these characters can die and be replaced with randomly-generated replacements who fill the same role in conversations, which is super confusing at first. The novelty of its physics can be entertaining early on, but combat maps are randomly generated and rarely spawn the elements required for physics opportunities beyond pushing a column on top of an enemy, and that gimmick wears thin by the end of the 8-12 hour campaign. Some melee units have attacks of opportunity, but you can forget about incorporating these into physics combos—melee attacks cancel any physics movement. Fort Triumph is a miserable, uninteresting slog until you manage to level up a team of characters, which makes one wonder why their deaths are even an option in the first place. I can’t help but wonder how the devs squandered their time in early access. Why did it take so long to release something so rough?

Fort Triumph isn’t a pretty game by any stretch, but if you can get past its overwhelmingly busy art style, I have 1,652 backer-exclusive screenshots.

Fort Triumph‘s story is largely a collection of halfhearted jokes/references

For the longest time, giving Fort Triumph a 0 in the story department (which is equivalent to “I can’t tell these characters apart and have no idea what’s going on”) was a very real possibility; anyone who dies disappears forever, but you’re given low-level replacements on the very next story map who continue where the slain character left off. That’s not the half of it, though—each story mission automatically adds the highest-level character of each class to your party, so if you’ve leveled up a couple of archers and are comfortable using them together, one will be replaced with a level 1 nobody out of nowhere the second that something has to happen in the story. That’s unusual, and nothing ever explains that these different characters are the same, so it’s easy for a newcomer to lose a couple of characters early on and get bombarded by so many different replacement character names that it’s difficult to remember the ones that matter. This would have been a nice thing for Fort Triumph to explain.

This counterintuitive, have-our-permadeath-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to storytelling isn’t worth all of the trouble it causes. Fort Triumph doesn’t have a meaningful story so much as a lazy patchwork of jokes and references that are set up by droning back-and-forths that will see you almost entirely tuned out by the time the punchline hits. Every character has a predilection for saying nothing in as many words as possible.

Sometimes, this works in spite of the jokes’ suboptimal delivery. The occasional jokes that contrast the fearsome reputation of your opponents with their mundanity are always good for a chuckle. Most of the time, though, these attempts at humor barely register, and there’s a sudden shift in the tone at the end of the second chapter. Everything in the entire game is a joke until one random guy a character knows attacks everyone and is killed, after which point that character decides to make a poignant “are we really so different” speech as his companions console him. Then you go back to murdering everything like it’s all a big joke. “Jarring” doesn’t even begin to describe it. It doesn’t help that no one in this game has any kind of meaningful development. Fort Triumph implies development but lacks the sense of payoff you get from being present throughout the transformation, and since those implications are buried under poorly-constructed punch lines and one hugely ill-fitting tone change, there’s almost nothing to grab hold of here.

One thing that both the story and gameplay have in common is that they become moderately more tolerable toward the end of the game. It was nice that the optional party members who I made an effort to keep alive showed up during the final boss fight, especially since I knew who they were by then thanks to my efforts to simplify the storytelling by keeping everyone alive and avoiding bodyswaps. In many ways, though, the glimmers of potential only make the slipshod storytelling hurt that much worse by showing how the final product could have been better.

sRPG physics are fun, but good luck figuring out how anything works here

Fort Triumph is basically fantasy XCOM with physics. Each of your characters is given 3 action points per turn that can be spent on movement or attacking (attacking typically costs 2 points, so characters who haven’t unlocked a way of earning more action points by defeating enemies or using an ability typically get one attack and short movement per turn), and then all of your enemies can attack. Melee units often come with attacks of opportunity that trigger when an opponent crosses into/out of their range, and ranged units have an overwatch ability that allows them to attack any opponent who crosses into their range. If you think you know how these work, though, you don’t. On at least one occasion (which is shown off in one of the included screenshots), an overwatch attack was triggered on an enemy despite that attack having a 0% chance of hitting. There are abilities that can give a character the ability to dodge an overwatch shot after killing an enemy, but they hadn’t killed any of my characters. Nothing I’ve learned about how Fort Triumph works explains why my overwatch was wasted on an impossible attack.

Attacks of opportunity, meanwhile, only trigger once per turn, so you can’t continually move enemies into and out of a melee character’s range to do tons of damage. Sometimes, though, they refuse to trigger that first time, either. Fort Triumph has an incredibly basic tutorial that explains virtually nothing about how these mechanics function, so your strategy always has to account for things randomly not working for unknown reasons. If you don’t, this will kill one of your characters.

Losing a character is a huge penalty because Fort Triumph is a painfully repetitive game until you level your team up. It’s only when they unlock a range of possible attacks that you’re able to use any kind of actual strategy, and that takes hours. Losing a character doesn’t just result in combat becoming harder—it also results in combat becoming significantly less interesting.

And that’s a problem because Fort Triumph‘s combat isn’t great even at its best. The much-vaunted physics system can be fun to play around with for an hour, allowing you to use physics abilities (mostly kicks, a magical tornado, and arrows that push and pull enemies around) to push heavy things on top of enemies in order to damage and stun them for a turn, but levels are procedurally generated and rarely spawn layouts conducive to elaborate physics interactions. You start the game knocking pillars onto enemies and you’ll end the game doing largely the same thing. The damage you can do with physics also tends to be on the low side unless you get lucky with the environment and have your characters lined up in a certain way. By the end of the game, I was using physics to knock down walls so that I could hit hiding enemies who were on overwatch. That’s the main benefit. And honestly, Fort Triumph‘s physics are all over the place; opponents and objects often get caught on unexpected parts of the environment and have their momentum redirected, or simply don’t travel as far as you expected them to. It also becomes harder to stun enemies toward the end of the game. It’s a lot of effort for little gain.

Fort Triumph is still incredibly buggy, and its controller support is terrible

Fort Triumph doesn’t have an “undo movement” button (and taking a single step spends a full action point), so misclicks can be a very real problem. This is slightly less of a problem on a controller, which is why I opted to go that route, but controllers have plenty of their own issues. Tooltips that show up when using a mouse sometimes don’t show up when using a controller. I spent a depressing amount of time assigning items to characters based on their colors and what I expected them to do because item descriptions refused to show for me. On between 10-20 occasions, I found myself unable to move at all with a controller on the Heroes of Might & Magic-inspired overworld map. The only fix for that was to use a mouse to remind Fort Triumph that it should be doing something. I’ve seen the game get stuck on an enemy turn. Characters have spawned inside of the scenery. What really sucks is that it’s often impossible to target enemies standing on top of things when using a controller. Imagine the frustration of finally finding a use for the physics, only to harmlessly kick the rubble your opponent is standing on instead of them.

Some parts of the scenery are flammable. I never figured out how to tell what is and isn’t (maybe nestled in some keyboard and mouse-exclusive menu?), so my characters would occasionally use a fire ability and set themselves on fire. Other times, moving in a way that triggered an enemy’s attack of opportunity or overwatch attack didn’t display the visual indicators that are supposed to warn you ahead of time, resulting in my characters taking unnecessary damage. At one point, you have to go through 3 battles in a row without saving. I’m pretty sure that only happened once. There’s also exactly one escape sequence. Mission goals constantly change in a non-obvious way, and it’s possible to auto-fail a map before you realize that the failure condition in question was added. It’s insanity that so many sRPG faux pas went unaddressed during early access.

Busy, incoherent visuals and… wait, does this game even have music?

Fort Triumph‘s refusal to explain its basic mechanics is bad enough, but its busy visual style that often sees numerous popups overlapping and remaining on the screen for only a brief moment exacerbates things by making it difficult to figure out what’s happening during chaotic sequences (which in turn makes it difficult to learn why something happens and better understand the mechanics). Plus, the visuals are just ugly. Every area in each chapter looks nearly identical. The only exception is the first chapter, which has a full three potential looks to its procedurally generated areas. You know it’s bad when that kind of variation is exciting. It’s almost like Fort Triumph goes out of its way to look bad, with its occasional cinematic camera angles—which are bizarrely angled to look like they were filmed by a drunk halfway through a fall—often clipping through the environment and leaving you looking at silhouettes behind a wall for a few seconds. Finally, there’s the music. I had to rewatch one of the videos I embedded to remember what it’s like. You won’t be surprised to find out that it’s uninspired orchestral fluff. That checks out.

Story: 1/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ -- 4/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Fort Triumph review. It took me around 12 hours to finish, mainly because nothing is explained and trial and error handicaps you long-term.

Fort Triumph review – Fort failure first appeared on Killa Penguin