Fate: Undiscovered Realms

Fate: Undiscovered Realms, a standalone expansion to Fate, followed the original game three years later. It continues with the same concept but has some lazy and outright weird design choices.

The "story" picks up where it left at the end of Fate, and you find yourself in the Temple of Fate, which has portals into two realms, the Outpost of Druantia and the Outpost of Typhon. You are given two heroic quests to kill a monster in a dungeon level of ~26 in both realms. Both of which are town levels similar to the Town of Grove in Fate. Except that one of them doesn't have an echanter nor a stash to store your stuff. (!) And to get to one realm from another, you have to go through the Temple of Fate, i.e. two loading screens. Holy inconvenience, Batman!

And like that wasn't enough, both of the dungeons have the same difficulty progression. This means you either do few quests in one realm and then travel to the other to do the same. Or you can just ignore the other realm and do them one at a time, and then have no challenge for 20+ levels when you start crawling the second realm's dungeon. I chose the latter.

Also, there is an option to import your character from Fate. Why would you do this, though. The game just won't scale to the level of the imported character, so you would lose the last trace of challenge it has to offer. I tried importing my character, though, to see what happens. Evidently, not all the items (or gems/whatever) are in the expansion as my boots and one of the my axes vanished. Nice. But as I wasn't going to play the character anyway, it didn't matter.

Instead, I retired the character in Fate, heirlooming one of her rings (as they don't have stat requirements to equip), and imported the newly created character into F:UR. The ring happened to have +Hammer Skill on it so this time I dual-wielded hammers. Which, in hindsight, wasn't the best weapon to use in twos as Hammers come in speeds of Slow and Slowest (Axes are Normal or Slow). So I had to socket many +15% attack speed gems to get a tolerable swing speed.

The ring came in handy, however, as on dungeon level three, in a destroy-the-monster-spawning-obelisk quest, the obelisk kept spawning a level 20 thunder dragon. Talk about out-of-depth monsters. Thanks to my ring, I was able to kill it, though. And when it respawned, it did it inside a wall, leaving me free to destroy the obelisk.

When I was finally done with the Outposts and returned to the Temple of Fate, a new heroic kill-boss quest was given and a portal to a new dungeon opened. And, of course, the new dungeon's progression started from level one aswell...

So I started a no-challenge descent again, to dungeon level 31, to kill some Kaos dude. However, as no side quests are given to the third dungeon, I could just keep clearing the levels and send the pet to sell stuff once in a while. Then I was finally on dungeon level 31 and found the boss surrounded by a score of named manticores. And killing him proved to be quite hard. The game decided to suddenly throw a 100-ft. vertical raise to its difficulty.

All of the mobs cast spells, so at the start I had constantly five debuffs on (and the mobs probably five buffs), and I was being one-shotted frequently. After a few deaths, a bunch of super healing charms and couple trips back to town, the number of monsters to kill started finally going down and then Kaos himself was hammered to the ground. Thus, the game managed to bring at least some challenge in the end.

Apart from the failures in difficulty progression, Fate: Undiscovered Realms still has the same simple addictive gameplay found in an entertaining action rpg. You are constantly just going to kill a few more mobs before quitting as you've been playing quite a while already. A few becomes tens and soon you've cleared the whole level. And while you're at it, why not just descend to the next level to kill just a few more mobs. And then it's 2 o'clock in the morning.