⚔️ Royal Frontier | PS4 | Review | 8/10 | “Choose Your Own Death” ⚔️ @RatalaikaGames #IndieGame #IndieGameDev

Royal Frontier popped into our games code bucket and it was a title that immediately intrigued me with its classic looking pixel art style straight out of the SNES era which I am always a sucker for.

Royal Frontier is a Roguelite, Run Based, Choose Your Own Adventure (death), Pixel Art game with a ton of charm and an engaging turn-based battle system. As you might already be able to tell, I really liked my time with Royal Frontier (even though I didn’t think I would at first).

The game has random map layouts and 3 interlinking paths to choose from each time you play another run. The game kept me hooked with its challenges/trophies and its “one more go” mentality and I was spurred on to unlock the characters as I played through with my original starters in the form of Warrior, Mage and Healer.

The game starts off by letting you build your team of heroes and then it will take your team to the Temple to be blessed with a choice of 3 blessings from a list that includes Attack buffs, defensive buffs, luck buffs, health buffs and more are unlockable.

The game is then divided into chapters whereby you will choose a path to voyage across the screen. The path has icons on it that represent certain encounters within the game such as Fight, Discover, Shop, Rest and also a Boss Tile. Sometimes you can actually change your path halfway through as the tiles have a branch off of them in some instances.

As the maps are randomly generated I found the mechanic of choosing my path each time very exciting as you forward plan to see how to avoid the boss as you are underpowered or maybe you want to hit that boss after you’ve negotiated the random discover tiles. For me, it felt like a choose your own adventure that was constantly writing and re-writing itself and this was endlessly intriguing.

When you enter into a fight with a boss or a set of grunts then you are put into a turn-based battle with your party able to use weapons and special powers that are class-based. I found the fights fun and the timing based boosts to attacks kept me engaged in what was going on on-screen as it meant that to deliver the optimum attack I needed to time my button press or maybe to defend my character I needed to also make sure I was awake to an enemy attack to get that button press right.

The timing-based approach also varies with a golf game style timing gauge, a button bash and the standard press the X button at the right time style of timing attack. This really helps keep the whole game fresh and at the same time simplifies combat so that truly is a pick-up and play turn-based strategy game that anyone can play.