Putting a no on a game that I've invested almost 60 hours in is a weird feeling, especially knowing I'm going to put in more hours for no reason other than being stubborn. With FTK the longer I play the more and more it's glaring problems make me want to drop the game and forget about my usual tendency of getting all the achievements or exploring all of the content before leaving a review.

Quite frankly, where as there are steps you can take to succeed, the core ways I've found to at all "master" the game involve breaking it all together as otherwise you are going to be broken encounter after encounter by the pure RNG of getting either loot that does nothing for your party or "the bad bunch" of enemies that compared to their peers are so drastically set on ending your adventure that lest you had a party rush on characters who've used gold income multipliers to get ridiculously strong, will do just that. I've had runs where I was rolling fights left and right and everything felt spectacular, but then I meet Stone Giants that petrify half my team and knock them out one by one into an irrecoverable loss or even worse compositions that haste their team and then you get blasted by unmanageable levels of damage. This game is cheese or be cheesed and if you are at all under leveled or under geared, which is incredibly easy to be on higher levels of difficulty, there is a good chance you'll wander into a fight that you were dreadfully destined to lose, if for nothing more than our classic Xcom feel of whiffing a 90% roll. Your initial impression of "okay I'm level 2 I can do this dungeon now" will be quickly squashed when you see the boss is level 4 and has debuffs that stun your whole team or devours half of the team's HP while inflicting debuffs at the same time. There is a reason this game has a pop up every time you start it saying basically "expect to lose, it's gonna happen".

Now I don't hate hard games, it's quite the opposite with some of my favorites being pretty brutal Iron Man style experiences, but the problem is the glaring issue of just how drastic the randomness is. In some campaigns the randomness is better than others, but at it's core I personally think there is just too much "lol haha" design in this game that bogs it down tremendously. In the main campaign you can generally get ahead of the curve but in some campaigns like the infinite Cellar or 5 Dungeons the world is constantly scaling to your characters so you have to be absolutely on your A game with mechanics (and getting good item drops) or you'll be rolled.

TL:DR Honestly the game has great ideas and unique twists on one of my favorite genres, but the core mechanic of the game being Shock Value RNG "No Way That Happened" punches just isn't worth it in a game that can take (for me) anywhere from a several hours session to several days worth of sessions from how either A bored I get of abusing the game's mechanics to be undefeatable or B how poor the run goes from every useless piece of gear to missing rolls left and right that make a trivial encounter game ending.

All and all, much of this review is probably moot as they have released FTK 2, which I will definitely check out one day, but I sincerely hope they improved on a lot of what has been included in this borderline rant review. I'd say just go to that one if you want to give it a try, but were there not a FTK2, I would probably say not to try this at all. There are games that better reward your time investment from a roguelike/ironman save standpoint and will be much less frustrating along the way.

I have a love-hate relationship with this game.

I had been keeping an eye on this game for quite some time, seeing it on sale numerous times, but I never took the plunge. Eventually, I found myself in search of a great co-op experience, and with this game repeatedly popping up in Steam sales, I decided to purchase it while it was discounted.

After almost 20 hours of gameplay (approximately 10 hours in co-op and 10 hours in single-player — I couldn't wait to dive in, so I explored the single-player mode), I've come to see this game as a middle ground between Talisman and Heroes. It incorporates elements of D&D, offers a fantasy setting, and boasts a wealth of content and variety.

However, there's a significant amount of RNG and grinding involved. Despite this, it's a very engaging game. I highly recommend playing solo, and it's incredibly fun with friends, though it can be frustrating if you lose and your progress is wiped.

Fun at times, waaayyy too much RNG