Set in a world that has been broken into pieces, Fractured Worlds has you jumping into various bits of this world to find out what happened whilst fighting off legions of enemies, levelling up, and collecting as much loot as possible in a Diablo-like fashion. It sounds promising enough, but it unfortunately misses the mark.
Combat here is meant to take a considered, slower approach, more carefully picking off enemies rather than wading into groups of them at once. It works well enough at first and it’s most evident when fighting tougher enemies, like bosses and elites, who last long enough to feel like you need to be careful. However, since you’re generally not fighting elites, battles against the base enemies and in small groups quickly become repetitive.
It has its upsides, though. I like that you can charge a spell and save it until you want to actually use it, which is useful for getting your most powerful spell ready to open with in the next fight. Each weapon type also has its own moveset that you’ll need to adapt to, or find the one that works best for you and stick with. These and the slow, methodical approach to combat ensures that it feels pretty satisfying at first, but the more I play the more basic it feels. Enemies just stand there until you come near them and their behaviours are simple, always just walking towards you and attacking. Then there’s some bugs, like enemies just standing still and not attacking sometimes, which really don’t help either.
The areas you head into are procedurally generated and also feel very repetitive almost from the beginning. They’re also filled with small, separate groups of enemies, so unless you’re stupid enough to run around at random you’ll only really fight a handful of enemies at a time and spend time running through empty space in between. Occasionally, an enemy will drop a portal which can be used to teleport to any other dropped portals on the map, which is a great feature for shortening the constant running as you look around. It only goes so far though, especially since the maps themselves are bland and uninteresting to explore anyway.
If you die in a dungeon, you’ll be sent back to base camp. Here you can go back to the dungeon on the floor you died on, enter a new dungeon, and upgrade your equipment. There are some cool features here, like transferring affixes from one item to another, allowing you to take the nicest bits of lesser loot and stick on the thing you actually want to use. It’s a useful feature, even if actually using the UI is a little bit awkward. You can also buy some more equipment should you be missing something important thanks to RNG, as well as buy map shards. These can be used to go to maps that have modifiers applied to them, such as increased health for enemies, or extra damage, that sort of thing, where the rewards will be similarly improved.
Equipment is as important as ever, with enemies dropping loot on the ground for you to peruse as you might expect. You have a pretty limited inventory though, ensuring you’ll probably have to drop some things to make room pretty often, which is frustrating. Loot is sorted into the usual rareness categories, with legendary items being powerful enough to build your whole character around. Thankfully the game has a classless character system, so you don’t pick a Rogue and stick to its abilities, you pick the abilities you want and fit them together however you like. You can also respec to best adjust to and take advantage of any powerful weapons you find.
Meanwhile the game looks decent enough whilst playing. The early maps are particularly bland, but the base area looks nice enough. It won’t be winning any graphical awards but they get the job done. Voice acting is pretty decent as well, though again it won’t amaze. Unfortunately there are some frame rate issues playing on the original Switch, particularly around tougher enemies who have slightly fancier effects around them.
