Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale review
Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale is the highly anticipated follow-up to the excellent Meteorfall: Journey. Despite its similar look (thanks to the excellent artistic stylings of Evgeny Viitman), Krumit's Tale feels like quite the departure from Journey, but in a good way. This game has a much wider scope, to the point that it can feel like a different game (or perhaps even several different games), while still retaining its wonderfully zany core and commitment to ultra-convenient play. In short, Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale is excellent.
Columns, rows, and inventories, oh my!
For those that played Meteorfall: Journey, hopping into Krumit's Tale is a bit disorienting. Where Journey was a super-streamlined deck-builder where you focused all your energy on drawing the perfect sequence of one-card hands to defeat a progression of monsters, Krumit's Tale throws pretty much all of that out the window. Dungeons are now 3x3 grids comprised of both enemies and your own deck of gear and abilities, and you can choose how you want to go about dealing with them with some knowledge of what will drop down into the grid next.
Your goal in these dungeons is to defeat all the enemies in them so you can eventually reach the Uberlich and defeat it. To help you with that, you'll need to take advantage of the cards you bring with you, but you can't just grab any old gear or ability off the grid whenever you want it. Each card in your deck has a price, and you need to earn enough coins from defeating enemies, discarding cards, or picking up chests to buy these items and put them in your inventory (which can only hold up to four cards). These conditions make it so you have to balance quite a few variables, both in terms of the overall composition of your deck and the tactical decisions you need to make in each dungeon.
Shuffle things up
Krumit's Tale's core seems built around replayability. There are five hero classes you can start a run with, all of which have unique items, abilities, and perks. After each dungeon, you also have the opportunity to pick additional perks, gain new cards, and even re-tool your deck further using currency accrued based on the number of cards you didn't exhaust to clear the dungeon. Whenever your run ends, you also earn experience for the hero you played as, which can lead to unlocking even more cards to use with them in the future.
If that weren't enough, Krumit's Tale also features a whopping nine different game modes, plus a daily challenge that allows you to test your skills against other players for the top spot on the leaderboard. Playing each of these game modes (particularly with different heroes) can shift gameplay considerations so significantly that they sometimes feel like you're playing a different game, ensuring that you'll have no shortage of things to do or try out.
A worthy purchase indeed
All of this deep and varied roguelike goodness is set against the colorful and weird Meteorfall universe, which is brought to life via high-quality art, animation, and--in the case of Krumit, the eponymous narrator of your quest--voice acting. These touches take what would otherwise feel like a boilerplate dungeon-crawling affair and turn it into a silly and somewhat gross world of Snotwulfs, Nuke Vikings, and Trash Golems.
The same attention-to-detail in the game's gameplay and presentation also extend to its overall mobile design. You can play Krumit's Tale in either portrait or landscape orientations, and it has a quality cloud save system so you can switch between devices with ease. Heck, you can even import your save data from the PC version of the game if you'd like (and vice-versa), or unlock all the cards and classes at the touch of a button if you'd prefer not to grind for them.
The bottom line
Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale is simply an exquisite package. It is a well considered and significant evolution of Meteorfall: Journey and then some. The preponderance of modes, loads of personality, and tons of convenience features add so much to what is already a fantastic game at its core. This is a must-buy.
