Royal Frontier is the latest game from indie publisher Ratalaika Games and developer Woblyware where you’ll be undergoing rogue-like turn-based battles while guarding a caravan along a journey. It’s up to your three warriors to make sure they reach their destination.
The game gives you a party of three characters to start with but more can be unlocked as you play. The three starting ones include a wizard named Ghazan, a solider named Rodric, and a healer named Roman. Once you got your party formed it’s time to set off on a 45-day journey across a map made up of nodes. There are three maps in total each of which has three paths made up of 15 nodes each. It’s up to you to choose whichever path you want and begin the trip. Once you finish the path on one map, you’ll move onto the next one. Each node on the map that you move to brings up some kind of random event whether that be a fight, a boss battle, a treasure chest, a shop, or something else.
More often than not you’ll be entering into battles along the map with your party of three and the opposing three enemies attacking in turns. The combat is relatively simple as you choose to either attack or defend with each character but there is a bit of timing that plays into it as well. You’ll notice your party members will flash at times and if you press the X button during this moment then you’ll get a buff to whatever action you selected to do whether it be attacking, defending, or using magic. Winning fights awards you with XP to level up and gold. Leveling up increases a stat for said character but which one it is will be random as well as the amount that it goes up by. The gold you earn can be used to purchase items from shops you encounter along the way. These can be things like healing potions or new equipment.
At the end of each path you’ll encounter a boss battle that could either end your run or leave your team in rough shape for the rest of the trip. Even if your run ends you can start a new one and have access to new perks and Blessings to make your next run more successful. A Blessing may make your characters deal more damage or gain XP faster among other things so choose the ones that sound the best to you. Because the events you encounter are random each time you play you could keep playing this for quite some time but I got tired of it after a few hours and moved on. It didn’t help that the game doesn’t do much with the art style or audio to impress you but I find that to be the case for most games from Ratalaika Games. Trophy hunters will find 13 trophies here including a Platinum and like most games from Ratalaika you can earn them all quite quickly.
The trip through Royal Frontier is full of randomness and challenge and if the gameplay grabs you then you can spend a good amount of time here. For me, it didn’t do enough to keep me wanting to play it for more than a few hours but for someone else you could spend dozens. If you fancy a low priced turn-based roguelike adventure then give it a shot.
*Royal Frontier is available now on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. PlayStation 5 version reviewed. Review copy provided by the publisher for this review.