E3 2017 – Hands on with Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star

There are games at E3 that one can walk past and not notice, not for any particular reason, but you just don’t notice it, Fate/Extella was a game that I did notice, but as I did not have any time booked for it, the constant line up of people to give it ago made me walk on by each time. On the final day however, the doors opened early and people ran right past it to play other games and as I had time, I gave it a go.

Right off the bat, I can tell you that if you like any of the Warriors style games, including Hyrule Warriors, then you are going to feel right at home here, the gameplay is almost the same. As my time on the game was very tiny, I have no idea who any of the characters were, nor what was going on, but that’s ok, I was sending scores of enemies into the sky as I demolished them with super powerful attacks. What I can tell you, is that there were three sections on the map where I needed to go and clear out some more powerful enemies, but rather than them just being there, they would only appear once I had destroyed enough of the lower level enemies in that section.

The game has already released on another platform, so you can see videos online of it inaction, but the Switch version was new and it’s more about how it performed here. As the game was created on more powerful hardware, you might think that the Switch version would suffer from low res textures or slow performance, I can say though, that I did not notice anything like that. The game was nice and smooth, with the Switch docked and myself using a JoyCon Grip controller setup, attacks were either light or heavy and once enough attacks were landed, my special gauge filled up, letting me unleash a more powerful attack.

Move the character around was again nice and fast, moving from section to section had me traversing through scripted movement sequences, when in action though, the game did have this issue of not allowing me to move from one direction to another, if I were in the middle of a combo. This could be an issue of the build or perhaps there was some trick that I did not understand. One element that I did get very sick of, quite quickly though was the power attack, it does vary from character to character, but as I only played the one character, it repeated each and every time.

Fate/Extella is a game that is going to appeal to a very specific audience, the gameplay has been seen before, but the story seems interesting, with it being due for release later this month, you won’t have to wait long to see for yourself.