‘Portal Fantasy’ Launch Review: Exciting Concept, Poor Execution

When I first came across Portal Fantasy I was really excited to give it a go, I’m always interested in checking out games inspired by Pokemon to see what they improve on whether it’s in terms of artstyle, creature design or gameplay mechanics. Portal Fantasy in particular drew me in with its pixel art style, an artstyle which I’ve constantly adored all throughout my gaming lifetime. Read our full Portal Fantasy launch review below.

Portal Fantasy is a top-down creature collecting RPG, the story follows 1000 years after the War of the Goddesses where the Pyli Kingdom is thriving. Your character is a student of the Porble academy who as the game progresses will learn the dark truth about this world and its history.

Unfortunately, as soon as I launched the game I became immediately disappointed due to the amount of time it took the game to load, for a game of such a small file size I found it increasingly odd. When I finally got to the title screen, the loading times persisted as I started the game. Once I got in, I felt that the character customization menu wasn’t as expansive as I hoped. There were a few options for clothing, hairstyles, mouth shape and eye shape however I couldn’t figure out how to change the colors of any of those options.

The various areas of the game ran pretty well until I encountered The Silent Woods, from that point onwards the game took a hit in performance providing constant lag in every area that followed, I even noticed that the starting areas began to become laggy as well. This wasn’t the only issue I encountered as some of the side quests were incompletable due to floating platforms accelerating off screen whenever I loaded into an area or not appearing at all. This is also apparent in some of the game’s puzzles where there will be random resets forcing you to backtrack.

Talking about side quests, that and the main quests were one of the aspects that I had a lot of fun doing as they were rarely difficult to complete, most consisting of backtracking, handing in a resource that I gathered previously or capturing the occasional rare Porble. The game also makes the effort to warn you when a side quest may become uncompletable due to changes in the story.

The story was initially hard to grasp, it felt pretty generic as you were tasked to become a Porble tamer but eventually you encountered the mysterious parts of the story that began to grab some of your attention. Unfortunately aside from the game’s dungeons the story didn’t really grab my attention until the final moments of the 1.0 update. Admittedly, I found myself not being able to focus on the story due to the performance issues associated with the game. Perhaps when the game is better optimized I will do a second playthrough where I find myself focusing on the game’s lore.

With most of the performance issues out of the way, I would like to highlight the creatures we collect known as Porbles. They’re designed quite well, each having a design that helps them to stand out from each other. This game focuses heavily on a “fusion” mechanic which consists of stat-altering gems known as Augmentations to power up your Porble alongside the usual leveling system. When all the Augmentation slots are filled, you possess 6 Majesty Stones you are able to evolve a Porble to Mastery 2. The designs for Mastery 2 are quite basic, rarely changing the design of the Porble whereas Mastery 3 changes their form entirely but you do have to find a special station to do so. Overall, the fusion mechanic, while interesting felt a bit grindy, taking the “catch em all” phrase to a literal level as you have to dispel tons of Porbles for the required materials.

Speaking of the augment station and others I felt as though they were organised poorly, the crafting station for example orders the items by which recipes you unlocked first making for a lot of what could be unnecessary scrolling to find the right item. I’d love it if they’d sort it in order of tier for example the healing potions from lowest to highest healing amounts as well as make tabs for each type of item whether it be healing, augmentations, tools, etc. The shops could also benefit from these improvements.

The combat in Portal Fantasy, while it may seem basic with the usual “spam attack button to win”, it’s literally the only part of the game that runs well throughout its entirety. The battle animations are well done, I especially liked the attack animations during the various boss fights. The fights are pretty straight forward, the game features a smaller elemental typing pool consisting of 6 elements total; Water, Fire, Gaia, Lightning, Light and Dark making it easy to remember compared to other games which feature type advantage and disadvantage charts that consist of 10+ elements. The Porbles are also currently single typed though augmentations you’re able to give your Porbles moves from any other element.

Overall, while Portal Fantasy has its flaws in terms of performance and quality of life, I still found myself having an amazing time playing through the game due to the games inclusion of puzzle solving and resource gathering, I found myself spending countless late nights enjoying the gameplay and solving quests. Fortunately, the Portal Fantasy Team appears determined to rectify the game’s current issues as they seem to put out hotfixes almost daily so I remain optimistic that the game will perform as intended soon enough.

Portal Fantasy is developed by the Portal Fantasy Team, the game is available now on Steam for $19.99.

Thanks for reading our review of Portal Fantasy! If you enjoyed it, consider checking out our other Reviews and Gaming section.