Yet Another Fantasy Title, abbreviated as YAFT, is a new action adventure game for PC with an irreverent style.
The story of YAFT starts as so. You play as a roguish thief, who is being chased by the Prince and his guard for various reasons. The kingdom is falling apart, after the king was eaten by a dragon not too long ago. A friend helps you escape whilst you row slowly down the river, before the guard catches up to you in the village. You manage to slide past the guards by disguising yourself as a dragon, before the Prince catches you anyway. He accidently dies, and being the chosen one, the court wizard is somewhat upset.
The game then let’s you free, and at first it’s perhaps a little confusing. There is a decent sized map, of which you can go anywhere. Along the road there are horses you can ride or carriages you can steal, bandit camps you can take down or secrets to uncover. Killing enemies sometimes means they drop weapons, which you can equip by scrolling through the mouse wheel. I felt like I wasn’t quite getting it.
And then an early quest made me understand what the game was. You are being chased by the guard, who is flashing red and blue, and you have to get to a place to lower your wanted level, and I realised that this was basically a fantasy version of the original top Grand Theft Auto games. Once I understood that, I stopped expecting RPG elements, and started playing it like an action game with freedom, it became a lot more fun.
Like in those original GTA titles, the goal here is simple. You can run around the villages and cities smashing things up and killing villagers, stealing horses and carriages – and then try and escape from the guard for being a villain. You can collect weapons and money, and spend it on magic spells, of which there is a fair amount of variation, from fireballs to magical shields. There are quest markers on the map which progress the main story, but you don’t have to do them if you don’t want too, and there’s a fair amount of freedom within the quests.
I thought the general concept of the game was quite good. I’ve always like that style of game, and I think it works quite well here. I think the game may find a few detractors because a lot of people will start playing a game like this and just expect an RPG because of the way it looks, such is typical of isometric fantasy games.
The combat in the game is essentially bashing baddies with various weapons and using spells until the die. You can dodge or run around them, and they often gang up on you so carefully positioning yourself is key to not dying quickly. The controls let you face your character with the mouse, whilst moving with the WASD. There are various control schemes but I found this perfectly intuitive, and buttons can be remapped too. It’s worth mentioning a few reviewers on Steam have mentioned dissatisfaction with the controls, but I didn’t personally find it a problem.
There are two perhaps big sticking points to whether or not I think this game will be for you, the prospective buyer. The first is the humour. Humour is of course entirely subjective, and I think there will be people that enjoy the games irreverent tone and fantasy parodies, equally there are people that really find humour in games to be a little bit much, and just don’t enjoy it. Have a watch of the trailers on the Steam page and see if it’s for you.
The other point is the price. Whilst there is a decent game here and there are enough quests to last a couple days of game time, at £15.29 it is a little much for an indie title at this level. I think lowering the price to £9.99 would be much more reasonable and easier to recommend, at over fifteen pound it is directly competing with a lot of big titles that are regularly reduced to that sort of level in sales, and I don’t think it quite stacks up to them.
Overall, I enjoyed Yet Another Fantasy Title. It’s not a perfect game, there isn’t a huge amount of content for one and some may find the title a little lifeless. I do feel it’s overpriced, but for the type of game it’s trying to be, I think it’s succeeded.
Yet Another Fantasy Title is available on Steam here for £15.29. If you’re interested in PC gaming, why not check our our article on Game Pass for PC.
