Talented - ★★✮☆☆
Image: TurtleFox Games / IndieLoupe
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Developer: TurtleFox Games
Publisher: TurtleFox Games
Release: 20 December 2024
Price: €3,99/$3.99/£3.99
Playtime upon Review: 5.4 hours
Do you know what I like? Skill trees. My lasting memory of playing Final Fantasy X over twenty years ago is not so much Blitzball, or Chocobos, or even Tidus’ unsettling laughter, but the Sphere Grid. I’m not going to pretend my pre-teen mind had any idea what I was doing with it, but it was fun. I likely spent more time exploring it than the actual game, and ever since then, I’ve been a sucker for a good skill tree.
Therefore Talented from TurtleFox Games should be right up my street. The game is played in two phases, the day phase, where players explore the headline mechanic of the game - it’s talent tree - and the night phase, where they fight off waves of enemies. It’s a pretty standard setup for any action roguelike, and it starts out fun enough, but it doesn’t take long for the cracks to show.
“The first few times you explore each character’s tree are reasonably fun, and you do feel a sense of progression, but it’s significantly dampened by the way the other half of the game plays out.”
In other games, the skill trees you encounter have been designed by someone, ideally providing the player with meaningful decisions that allow them to weigh up their options and pick out neat little combos to create a truly unique character. When done well, a game can have exceptional replay value just from a player seeing what would have happened if they’d progressed down a different path. The choices the player makes fundamentally change the way they play the game.
The disposable, procedurally-generated nature of the trees offered in Talented don’t really allow for that. Instead, more often than not, you can find yourself beelining towards whatever epic or legendary skill has popped up in the fog, hardly paying attention to the common skills you take along the way. There isn’t much room to question if you’re better off increasing your health or attack speed, because you’re just en-route to a much more impactful ability. That is, when the fog doesn’t frustratingly reveal that there isn’t actually a link, and that you’ve wasted your last few talents heading down a dead-end. The first few times you explore each character’s tree are reasonably fun, and you do feel a sense of progression, but it’s significantly dampened by the way the other half of the game plays out.
The strategy in the night phase always remains the same: either windmilling around firing a handful of shots down each lane, or targetting the lane that has the closest enemy. Maybe you’ll occasionally use an ability, but that’s it. There are eight different flavours of elite monster in the game, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what any of them do, because ultimately it doesn’t matter. That is the crux of the problem with Talented: it feels like nothing truly matters, and that every decision the player makes is superficial because, in the end, every run is more-or-less the same. Your strategy or play style doesn’t change based on anything you unlock, because the four-button gameplay is too restrictive for it to do so.
Unfortunately, the lack of variation occurs not just between runs, but also within them. On your first run, you grind your way to night 20, ready for the big boss fight and… there just isn’t one. Instead, it’s more of the same, with different lighting and a slightly more aggressive soundtrack. I won’t pretend it can’t be fun mowing down rows of enemies with beams of arrows, but it wears thin quickly.
You can tell that TurtleFox have put care and attention into Talented, but the concept feels fundamentally flawed - it doesn’t matter how much effort they’ve put into each of the 100 abilities or 500 talents, because the overall impact they have on how you play is irrelevant. The execution is probably about as good as it can be, within the limitations of the combat system. I think, with a less restrictive concept, the team behind Talented could make a very strong game, and even though it didn’t hit the spot for me, I look forward to seeing what TurtleFox produce in the future. Talented is awarded ★★✮☆☆ by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was purchased by IndieLoupe.com. Talented’s rating was revised up from ★★☆☆☆.
