What goes up, must come down and while we’ve had a great run with some epic releases for 2024, we finally hit a new low. With gaming seeing a massive uptick and new studios popping up more frequently, KRAKATOA STUDIOS joined the ranks of new developers wanting to make a mark. Now, this Indonesian studio looks like it was founded roughly in 2022 or 2023 and they wanted to hit the ground running with a massive release, FRACTALS OF DESTINY. However, even though it looks like what might be a great action RPG with some good mechanics, there are some equally huge caveats that might sour this game’s release out of Early Access on 6 April.

FRACTALS OF DESTINY takes place in the very distant future of 5823 in the middle of a war between the Velixar Azartus of the West universe, and the Light Empire of the East universe. While the war rages on, the United Alliance has run out of intervention options due to a lack of resources and troops, but this is where Zerva comes in. She is born as a mixed race with powerful gifts that give her an advantage in the war, and she is now the only hope to bring peace and an end to the chaos.

Now, you’ll be taking on the role of Zerva in FRACTALS OF DESTINY, but before you can attempt cutting your enemies down, you’ll need to sit through the initial cinematics. Before you jump on the bandwagon to say that this is a mundane detail, this is also where the issues begin, as the intro cinematics are supposed to set the stage while giving you some much-needed information as to what’s going on. Unfortunately, you’ll have to sit through what feels like a painfully dry and monotonous monologue/voiceover, telling the first part of the story. To make matters even worse, there is the sneaking suspicion that it might be AI voiced or generated due to the audio quality and the obvious English mistakes.

Moving on to the next horror in FRACTALS OF DESTINY, the follow-up cutscene where some real action takes place, but it might just kill off what little hope there was for FRACTALS OF DESTINY. This shows Zerva and what looks to be her teammates making a grand stand against the Velixar Azartus of the West universe, though the developers were trying to go for the ‘over the top’ cinematic feeling, or there’s something much worse going on with how slow everything moved and progressed. Of course, there is one major thing to point out and that’s the amount of obvious intrusive fan service with targeted blurring and specifically aimed camera shots. This doesn’t help the game at all because it’s trying to be an RPG, but somehow, it’s trying to be a fan service release too… Pick one, having both to that extent doesn’t work.

You’ve survived this long; and you can finally jump into the action, but now there’s a new game-breaking issue that will garner a bad reputation for the rising studio behind FRACTALS OF DESTINY. We all love it when a new release has some optimization that helps reduce the hardware load while making the gameplay smoother, it’s become common practice in this day and age after all. Unfortunately, optimization is almost nonexistent, and your hardware will more than feel it. You’re more than likely to experience random stuttering, outright lag, massive framerate drops, or even the game just crashing altogether. However, the ‘grand fail’ above all the issues involves FRACTALS OF DESTINY outright causing GPU driver conflicts and failures with just how obscenely resource-hungry it is.

Unfortunately, due to the above-mentioned issues, making any decent progress to get a decent feel for FRACTALS OF DESTINY became a pipedream and left us in a predicament similar to last year’s release of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which we all know was a failure to launch. However, the show must go on, and we can only hope that the developers will fix these issues before it completely ruins what could be an interesting release, but that hope is fleeting faster than our hope of Half-Life 3 releasing sometime in the next century.

One of the biggest drawing factors for FRACTALS OF DESTINY is the combat system, and with a release like this, you’d expect the combat to be snappy and smooth. Disappointment seems to wait around literally every corner, and you won’t find snappy or smooth combat; instead, it feels like you’re fighting through tar as everything moves slowly and almost unresponsive. In terms of combat, Zerva’s main source of damage is up close and personal with her sword, but she also has skills at her disposal for some ranged attacks or utility. Sadly; swinging a sword like she might break a nail doesn’t make it all that appealing, and switching to skills for ranged attacks isn’t as easily done.

Skills in FRACTALS OF DESTINY are a great addition and can add a few fun twists to any fight, but they come with the downside of being unwieldy. This is really due to combat structuring: you can’t just freely attack, Zerva jumps between a combat and non-combat state. Sadly, this means that you’ll need to either be attacked or attack first with her melee weapon and then you can target an enemy with skills. Just like that, we add another flaw to the pile, and the nightmare isn’t even over yet because you’ll need some way to dodge or defend yourself. Now, while there is a dash and a dodge role of sorts, neither works particularly well, and you’re likely to still take some very unnecessary damage in the end.

Now, when you’re not out suffering to fight and navigate the world of FRACTALS OF DESTINY, you’ll also gain experience points for leveling along with mastery points, both of which are used for upgrades. However, not much is shown or revealed about how these works and the part they play aside from really minor boosts at first. To add fuel to the fire, the UI is without a doubt lacking and somehow over the top as well. We get it, adding extra flare in the form of background videos in the menus showing some of the flashier movesets is nice, but it also adds so much unnecessary drag to an already bloated release that struggles through every action.

Bringing everything full circle with what some might consider the most important part of any RPG, the dumpster fire that is the tutorial. You’d have better luck figuring out what to do than dealing with the lag caused by the tutorial popups. This is mostly because the game first slows down as if to create some cinematic effect, and then the popup shows. However, these popups might come with a small video that’ll cause even more lag or with a really bad voiceover in a voice that absolutely does not work for the theme in FRACTALS OF DESTINY. The voiceover might be another intentional part of the fan service side, but an overly cute and somehow shy Asian girl doing a voiceover for a tutorial in a rather serious game simply doesn’t work.

On the visual side of life in FRACTALS OF DESTINY, there are some good points, but upon closer inspection, there’s something fishy afoot. There is a lot of visual appeal and everything looks really well designed, but why was so much work put into designs and yet, everything else either causes issues or is just severely lacking? The biggest flaw on this front would be how slow things seem to move while fighting or exploring, once again, showing just how unoptimized this release is while highlighting the multitude of other issues.

On the other hand, FRACTALS OF DESTINY does feature a beautiful soundtrack, but that might also be the only redeeming quality to be found. Things only go downhill from here with the voice acting seen in cinematics which somehow doesn’t work for the mood or even the character expressions, and these are also slowed down with heavy pauses too. However, the most bizarre piece of voice acting would still be the introductory cinematic with the choppy audio and English mistakes.

Overall, FRACTALS OF DESTINY might end up taking the top spot for the worst release of this year. The seemingly never-ending string of issues when it comes to combat and exploration along with the technical problems due to the lack of optimization means this release isn’t a failure to launch, it’s an outright dud from the start. Sadly, it’ll take a huge miracle to save this game from vanishing into obscurity the second it releases out of Early Access.
 

Jay Claassen (@R3GR3T_3NVY)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed