Farabel Switch Rapid Review

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Fast Facts

Title: Farabel
Developer: Frogames
Publisher: Drageus Games
Website: http://drageusgames.com/tcportfolio/farable/
Genre: Adventure, RPG, Strategy
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Age Rating: PEGI 7
Release Date: 20/12/19
Price: £8.99 – Rapid Reviews was very kindly provided with a review code for this title.

“Since time immemorial, the King and High Priestess of Farabel have been able to alter the passage of time. A power which has been passed down from generation to generation.” And so Farabel begins, with a battle starting twenty days after the war started. You battle orcs on an odd hexagonal grid. The hexagonal grid makes for some bizarre manoeuvring with your controls. It’s very unwieldy.

Your King, as mentioned, has the power to turn back time – able to manipulate the “last few moments,” while the High Priestess “controls the hours, the days, and the seasons.” During the battle, this only means you can restore units to their status – and therefore HP – from the turn before.

After the first battle, you travel back in time to seventeen days after the war began (three days earlier), proceed to “level down,” and get to choose which character attributes to decrease as a result.

The purpose of travelling back in time is unclear at this point. And why does one have to level down? Why aren’t we travelling back in time at the same level to demolish our foes easily? I don’t get that point of the game. I had kind of hoped it would be more like Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. You don’t earn any experience during battles either, so you’re stuck with your levelled down stats. You also have different units each time you play (besides the King and High Priestess). Also, if you lose either the King or High Priestess, you lose the battle. The only good thing is that that doesn’t mean game over. You have to retry the battle when you’re ready.

You have a counsellor that gives you advice during battle – if you request the advice. They give you some vital information on the battle. Something I didn’t like was that once you’ve moved a unit, that’s it. You can’t fix your mistakes in moving. This is especially annoying due to the difficulty mentioned above manoeuvring on the hexagonal grid. You also can’t move the camera around to see behind obstacles, so it was a little hard to see the action sometimes. Another complaint I had is that it seemed as though your archers had less range than that of the enemies’. The enemy ballista range, too, was far too overpowered and had far too long of a range.

The graphics are quite simplistic, but I was impressed by the music. I liked that the High Priestess’ healing range extended so far and was able to heal many units at the same time.

Besides the regular campaign, which I found to be quite a snooze fest in terms of the “plot” and gameplay, there is also the classic mode and defence mode. In classic mode, you can choose the race you play as, the number of battles you play, the difficulty, your budget, the biome, visibility, enemy race, and unit level. I appreciate the customization options there. However, the ease of choosing was not great; the controls were confusing and made it difficult even to start the battles.

In classic mode, yet again the enemy archer’s range is far too long in my opinion. I also chose easy mode, but the massive enemy had 60 HP compared to the King’s 25! The scale was not very fair, in my opinion, or easy like it was supposed to be. And I could only do 4 damage to it at a time with my more powerful character. I just gave up. It wasn’t fun. It was unbalanced. Next, I tried defence mode, which seemed no different.

Overall, the game is a frustrating one. The controls are extremely bad and clunky, the difficulty felt unbalanced in the enemy’s favour, and the plot could have been so much more than it was. The premise was so good but was executed extremely poorly. The only real compliment I had for it was the premise and the soundtrack. I wish it had been better.

Rapid Reviews Rating

You can purchase Farabel from the Nintendo eShop on the following link, https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Farabel-1683431.html#Overview