Fate Undiscovered Realms

Fate Undiscovered Realms adds a pair of new levels, a dead-is-dead option, and pretty much nothing else to the original Fate. So expect this hack-and-slash role-playing stand-alone add-on to provide you with a good dose of deja vu if you have any experience with the previous game released back in early 2005. The simple charm of the core game design still looms large over this Diablo clone, however, which gives its clickfest dungeon crawling the power to suck you in for many, many hours.

Fate Undiscovered Realms

Undiscovered Realms is a continuation of the single-player story from the original Fate (there’s still no multiplayer). After a long campaign against the forces of evil, your hero returns to the town of Grove. Forget about any celebrations with beautiful elf maidens and grog, though. A mysterious stranger soon arrives and cons you into opening portals into two new realms, a wooded world called Druantia and an icy kingdom named Typhon. The cowled weirdo then reveals himself as some kind of evil wizard and takes off, leaving you to head through these gates as well to stop his dastardly machinations.

Character design covers the same old ground. Development is exactly as it was in the first Fate. There are no set character classes, so you craft your hero by assigning points to traits like strength and dexterity and to skills such as swords and magic every time you gain enough experience to level up. It’s a smooth, elegant system that lets you effortlessly build a fighter, a mage, or a jack-of-all-trades. Items are largely carried over from the original game. Monster drops feature a lot of the same swords, axes, and armor as before–albeit with the addition of some special items, such as the swathe quest gear–and the character spell list is identical. A pet dog or cat companion that levels up automatically is still at your side helping to battle the monstrous hordes, although now there are more transformation options available every time you feed Fido or Trixie one of the game’s magical fish. It’s kind of hard to tell what’s new, since you could already morph your pooch or feline into a wide selection of giant spiders, unicorns, wyverns, and more.

Fate Undiscovered Realms

Revival options after your character is killed remain unforgiving, with Fate himself appearing to extort gold, experience points, and/or hero renown to resurrect you. Even then, the options often aren’t good. The most affordable choices tend to get you ported to a level that’s a flight or two down from your earlier position or a few levels up without any of your gold. A new hardcore mode of play makes things even more challenging. On this setting, when you’re dead, you’re dead. Don’t even think about checking it out unless you’re a serious Fate veteran, because it’s murderously tough.

Not a lot of imagination went into setting up your adventures into these new lands, but they get the job done. Game structure here is also pretty similar to the original Fate and is based around hubs leading to towns and the dungeons. Your hero (either a brand-new one or an import of your character from the first game) starts off in the Temple of Fate hub, which features gates to Druantia and Typhon. From there, you choose a town to enter and wind up in a secondary hub populated by a motley crew of monsters who assign quests, sell goods, heal injuries, enchant items, and so forth. Once you do business here, you head off down the nearby steps to slay monsters and solve problems in pretty much limitless randomized dungeon levels.

Fate Undiscovered Realms

Fate Undiscovered Realms

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