Fortix 2 Review
PC
One of the lesser known classics of the early arcade era is Taito’s Qix. In this game, you try to capture areas of the board by creating shapes. Once a shape is drawn, you’re safe, but if an enemy touches a shape while you’re creating it, you die. And that’s about it. A few sequels, remakes, and variations of the Qix style of gameplay have shown up over the years with my favorite being Patchwork Heroes for the PSP (I highly recommend picking it up if the PSN store ever returns).
Fortix 2 is basically Qix with more stuff and a fantasy setting. There are temporary power-ups to grab, a host of enemies, various obstacles, and towers that shoot at you until you capture them or capture a catapult to destroy them. The music is serviceable, the graphics are colorful, and there are achievements and leaderboards to compete on.
Unfortunately, adding a bunch of new stuff to Qix’s core gameplay doesn’t really make it any more fun. Due to the towers and enemies that shoot projectiles or lock onto your position, you rarely can build anything for more than a brief moment before getting killed. As a result, the basic strategy is to build a series of tiny shapes to avoid dying until you’re able to block off a large part of the map quickly. Effective? Yes, but also fairly tedious.
The game has 30 stages which took me about two hours to go through. A few of the stages had some clever ideas, but for the most part, I was looking forward to beating the game since I wasn’t having much fun.
But then, someone told me about Zombie mode and my entire opinion of the game changed. In this mode (which is unlocked by doing something repeated on the title menu), risk taking was finally encouraged with tombstones that threaten to create overwhelming armies of zombies if too much time is taken and enemies that are slow enough and dumb enough that you can create decent-sized shapes without dying to a projectile. Finally, I was playing because I was having fun and not just to write a review.
Let this be a lesson to game developers – adding extra modes can be a low cost way to drastically improve the quality and value of your games. I was ready to completely discount Fortix 2, but by adding a new mode which can’t have taken more than a few extra days to create, I ended up actually enjoying the game.
Fortix 2 is currently available on Steam for $10.
