Fable Fortune fails to set itself apart in a crowded genre – Preview

On that front, what Fable Fortune offers isn’t terribly unique or interesting, either. If you’re familiar with something like Hearthstone, you’ll be pretty at-home here, with your hand of cards at the bottom, your hero character front and center, and any monster cards you draw sitting in the middle of the screen. Like Hearthstone, you also have a growing meter that allows you to play more and more powerful cards with each turn. In Fortune, this is presented as being an increasing treasure chest because, you know, “fortune.”

What is meant to set Fortune apart is the morality concept that has woven throughout each of the Fable games. When the series started, the idea of morality affecting gameplay was a pretty fresh one. Over the years, though, we’ve seen a million takes on that idea, and it’s become pretty commonplace.

In a card game, though? It’s new, I guess, but once again it is not interesting. In the card game, here’s how it works. At the beginning of the game, you choose an optional quest. The quest might be to spend a certain amount of gold, to play cards that have more strength than health, or to play lots of spells, for example. Each time you complete a side quest, you can pick between good or evil options. These options are meant to add a twist to the game, but aren’t so much a twist in the road as they are a speedbump. They’re inconsequential and, in my experience, add little to the game.

On top of that, the team does very little to on-board players into the game. Going in, you can choose to play versus or cooperatively, or you can hop into training. The training mode is simply the option to play against a computer opponent. There’s no guidance for why you might want to choose good or evil, why you might want to choose one character over another, or even exactly how the game works. I feel, looking at the game as somewhat of an outsider, like the developers have assumed anyone coming in has played Hearthstone. I haven’t. The learning curve was steep for me, and I still don’t really feel like I get it. And while the game starts with a pretty good loadout of cards, at least in this preview, the rate of currency acquisition feels like it’s pretty slow, and chatter online suggests I’m not alone in thinking that.

To really master the game, I’d have to end up heading to YouTube to see how other people are playing and to get some deck-building strategies. When I compare this to Gwent, it feels totally different. That game featured a tutorial, if a basic one, and a mechanic straightforward enough to make itself apparent without feeling too simple.

That lack of guidance is killer for anyone who isn’t going in with experience. It made an already frustrating experience even moreso.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/07/25/fable-fortune-preview/