The FATE series is made up of dungeon crawler RPGs developed WildTangent. Its new remaster, FATE: Reawakened, is a compilation of four games for players to sink their teeth in school random loot, treasure, and questing fun.
With a player-created hero ranging from human, dark elf, or even a monster, there are quite a few fun choices to make about how your hero looks in these games. You can even get a trusty pet companion that also gets all sorts of visual options.
The town of Grove is in need of your hero. What fate is in the story for this story, and are the treasures beneath the town of Grove worthy to pursue in this critically acclaimed series of classics? Find out as we spelunk deep within this FATE: Reawakened review.
FATE: Reawakened
Developer: gamigo US Inc., Tableflip Entertainment AB
Publisher: gamigo US Inc., WildTangent
Platforms: Windows PC (reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Release Date: March 12, 2025
Price: $24.99
As with all dungeon crawlers, the goal is quite simple: build your hero with random gear drops with randomly assigned stat rolls and complete quests. Players will have to continuously survive the oncoming floors with increasingly threatening monsters further in.
All four Fate stories manage to feel exactly the same as the last as far as the gameplay goes with some change-ups between the scenery, quests, and storytelling. The question that should be asked, however, is how well it manages to come together as a complete package.
Every time I booted up the game I must have poured in five hours straight of playing. The excitement of getting powerful gear outta nowhere from monsters and chests truly reaches its highs in dopamine value in Fate: Reawakened. This is due to the fact that you truly feel their effects and they all manage to have features that are cohesive.
Unlike Diablo 4, a lot of equipment effects have very headache-inducing conditions that are difficult to parse. In most cases with loot in Fate: Reawakened, effects like increased attack speed, mana-draining, raw attribute bonuses of your liking to your spec.
Nothing silly like increased damage under bizarre or very out-of-control situations like increased damage at a certain distance. Combat itself, however, has not aged well. Attacking with a melee weapon lacks punch and satisfaction upon their landing.
When you attack, it temporarily locks you in place for the animation to perform and the animation itself is actually overselling the distance of the hit, resulting in needing the player to get a lot closer than the animation allows.
Animation priority became an annoyance for me and made me decide to go fully into ranged combat with spells. It felt more gratifying, especially with how many spells exist in Fate: Reawakened.
I was blasting rooms of mobs away with tornadoes, and fireballs, and it was unleashing my power fantasy to be a powerful sorcerer.
Players can only slot one spell at a time. If I wanted to cast another spell in the heat of the moment, I would have to use the in-game radial menu to equip another one that’s already equipped via my character sheet.
There really isn’t too much to say about Fate: Reawakened as you get what you expect. It’s exactly what it promises in its most simple but elegant presentation a game can give. It’s a dungeon crawler where you make a hero of your own choosing, you explore a dungeon, find loot, and reap the rewards of the townspeople who sent you off to do their bidding.
It would have been nice to have a few things updated like a better way to hot-bar or cast spells, similarly to how it’s possible to quickly use potions. Strangely the lack of modern-day quality of life features such as this manages to only add to this game’s charm as a fantastic time machine, back to when western developers embraced dungeon crawler RPGs.
FATE: Reawakened was reviewed on PC using a code provided by WildTangent. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. FATE: Reawakened is now available for PC (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
