FORT Reviews

Its on russia!

Pretty good game. You can spend a couple of hours on this title.

Several pros: interesting little story, reminiscent of "Lost"; some pleasant surprises every few days; a comprehensive Beginner's Guide that pretty much lets you know everything about the stat pools, along with a little too much information about things like food foraging rates, for example. It would have been nice to find that out yourself. The "action" takes place on 1 screen, with two things to do: talk to your second-in-command about doling out the day's work and the front door which advances the day. Its SNES Harvest Moon appearance is adequate. If you buy a farm, it shows up in the camp. I wasn't able to fend off attacks long enough to risk foraging for iron again...but that's another story. Several cons: the reward system for being adept at tasks is all-or-nothing: 1-14 ranks in a skill are the same, only 15 changes results somewhat. This could easily be remedied by tiering rewards. Otherwise, it makes things a little difficult. Likewise the healing factor: it's also all or nothing. There doesn't seem to be enough recovery time between encounters. There also seems to be little logic in how military operations succeed: I've sent the farm against the third encounter and got repelled, despite having some good warriors in the bunch. I've also sent 3 in and cleaned house. There's also very little that seems to propel morale upwards compared to how fast it crashes. There are many unbalanced things like this. I make no qualms about difficulty, perhaps the difficulty is as intended and you're just hoping to survive 30+ days with no hope of reaching an end. The first time I played, I was able to make it to day 3 and the second time to day 34 before I was strung up in a mutiny. I will give Fort a tentative thumbs-up. It isn't truly a tycoon game, more of a survival experience similar to Banished but the depth ends there. I see a lot of opportunity with this game, should more work be put into it to balance gains and frequency of deficits. A scaling difficulty meter wouldn't hurt, but with proper balancing it may not be required. The Beard