Using the Terrain as a Weapon in Fort Triumph, a Promising, Upcoming Turn-Based Strategy

Fort Triumph is a turn based RPG with a strong sense of action. It pits you against overwhelming odds, although you have a secret weapon – you can use the scenery, not just for cover, but as weapons or to alter the terrain. With that on your side you might just be able to pull through.

You may be wondering what I mean by ‘use’. Well, here comes the interesting part; you can kick boxes to crush foes, topple trees to cross chasms and rivers (or crush foes) – you can blow up cover, or start persisting fires, and, well, there’s a mass of interactivity there.

This clever use of the terrain is a critical part of the game, and easily the part which drew me most to the game. There’s a surprising amount of interactions you can perform with the terrain in order to even (or, should I say level) the battlefield; and it really feels great when it all comes together and you turn around a situation with a little tact.

The build I’ve been playing doesn’t currently have a campaign in place, however within the skirmishes there are objectives which will fire the next part of the conflict – kill X and the next step will happen. As stand alone missions these are fine, but I’d really love to get some emotional attachment to these characters – but maybe I’ve been spoiled by the likes of XCOM. That said, there is a satisfaction in having terrain and cover now possibly become volatile, and that gives me a satisfaction of planning moves ahead that few other games do.

It’s all done with a very cute, cartoony & colourful palette, which doesn’t grow old, and really suits the fantasy world from its gardens to its goblins; even the, plentiful, spiders shine with the style.

The controls are very simple, and the current build included a solid tutorial – and not one that was too hand-holding. It explained what the skills of each “hero” does, skills such as the whirlwind skill, which is great for knocking over towers and trees, and the toasty fireball skill which -naturally- burns anything; houses, trees, bushes, enemies, the list goes on, it’s fire magic done right.

Every hero can level up as in any RPG, but after every level comes a new skill which revolves around that character. The mage might later on learn how to create platforms, the archer can get frozen shots to slow enemies down, and later on the melee/tank builds can buff up +1 to all the stats of any nearby allies.

All in all Fort Triumph is gonna be one of those games i’m gonna be keeping my eye on, even though i’m not much of a turn based gamer myself, this has turned me into someone that frowns at making the most simple mistakes for not using cover when I should have, or even activating a skill on my tank that negates 2 damage done to him when close to an enemy…

From what is on show so far, I’m really impressed with the game. The build I’ve been playing is only five levels long, however it shows off a variety of mission types (including a challenging hold-out mission where you’ve got to survive for a set amount of turns against the odds).

At time of writing, the game is in a decent state, and it’s likely to only get better based on what I’ve seen.

Fort Triumph will be heading to Kickstarter later this year, the game was originally listed on Steam Greenlight for an early 2017 release, however we’ll have to wait and see the Kickstarter page for more details