Trials of Fire review – seduced by sculpting the perfect RPG team

Trials of Fire is a powerfully seductive game. It pulls on a desire to sculpt a perfect RPG team, to have them gleam in the best equipment and have them wield the strongest powers, and to see them work together in beautiful synergy. I find few things more pleasing in an RPG, and I bet you do too, and Trials of Fire knows it.

Trials of Fire review

• Developer/Publisher: Whatboy
• Platform: Played on PC
• Availability: Released 9th April for £12.39 on Steam

But rather than make you play for tens of hours to achieve this, Trials of Fire condenses everything into around one or two. Everything’s still there, all the hallmarks of an RPG adventure – picking a team, journeying across a map, battling, levelling, looting, dilemmas, bosses – it’s just squished into a much shorter period of time. Short enough to play again and again and again. And you will: it’s a very hard game to put down!

But it takes time to get to grips with. It’s because it’s three games in one. Fundamentally, it’s a card game, a deck-building Roguelike, so you get one collective life to see how far you can get. Everything you do in battle is powered by cards. You start with a basic few, and upgrade and swap them as you level. But cards also come attached to equipment, and the better the equipment, the more there are attached to it. So as you equip, your arsenal builds, but as with any deck-building game, more is not always better, as it lowers the chance of drawing the cards you most want to use.

Then, there are grid-based, turn-based battles, where your characters and the enemies are tokens. The important part here is these tokens need to move around the grid (by using movement cards) to get in range for spells or melee attacks or whatever you have up your sleeve. They’re specific. And if you’re surrounded by enemies, it can mean death because of triggered combo strikes, which can whittle you down, so movement is very important.

Each round, each hero draws three cards, and you use a collective pool of willpower to use them. Enemies do the same. You can recycle a card (get rid of it) for extra willpower and/or defence, too. Therefore, in addition to movement, things like willpower, card-draw, defence, and obviously attacks, become key things to consider, and there are myriad cards and powers that play off of them.