Call of Fate is Prudence's second audio game released on Android and IOS widely available to the western English speaking market; the first was Ranger Legend. Unfortunately, I found Ranger Legend to be confusing, difficult, and slightly buggy. I'm pleased to say that despite some flaws, Call Of Fate is a much better outing!

Call of Fate is a cultivation style progression game, with automatic battles and a lot of resource management. It does an excellent job hitting that "make numbers go up!" feeling that I suspect most players are looking for from this sort of game. There are so many different types of diamonds and crystals and tokens and coins that you're pretty much always getting a large reward of something. There are even wish tokens and advanced wish tokens that can be turned in for randomized rewards.

The sound design is also excellent. Even without a learn sounds menu, it's possible to tell what's happening just by listening to the battles. At least on IOS, the 3d panning plus spatial audio really brings the battles to life, and makes all those reward sounds pop. The interface sounds provide excellent queues while navigating the games deep menu structure, making quickly developing muscle memory easy.

While still somewhat awkward in some places, the English translation is good enough that western players won't find themselves lost at any point. The primary issue is a lack of consistency; sometimes the name of some characters is written in romanized Chinese, and sometimes the same character name gets translated into English words. Similarly, sometimes the character class is called cleric, sometimes pastor, and once or twice healer. Sometimes the interface calls improving your character training, and sometimes it calls it cultivating.

As with many casual mobile games, Call of Fate does have microtransactions and a premium currency. If you're focused on the leaderboards, I could see it feeling pay to win. But the game is generous enough with its premium currency that I've never felt pressured to pay just to progress, and no content or activity is locked behind a paywall. If you're going to pay for anything, get the monthly card in order to unlock several quality of life features that will save your fingers a few minutes of clicking and swiping each day.

Now that I've talked about the positives, let's talk about the more neutral aspects, followed by some of the flaws. First off, I have to talk about the story and game world. I have a deep background in the Tolkien enspired mythos that most western stories and games take place in, and almost no exposure to Chinese fantasy at all, so a lot of this is just my personal impressions and opinions.

When playing a Tolkien enspired RPG, there are things that I just accept as the way the world is. Of course I can find boots that make me smarter, gloves that make my prayers more effective, and a wristband that makes me faster. Dwarves live underground and drink, trolls are smelly and stupid, and vampires are vulnerable to sunlight. Players don't even need these things documented anywhere...it's just obvious. But when playing Call of Fate, all of the various crystals and metals and tokens and things, combined with the unsaid assumptions, throw me for a loop. For example, S rank is better than A rank. Why? Who knows! The game never tells you this, you're just expected to already have this knowledge. Why does ranking up destroy all of your meterials? Where are they going! Are my characters...eating crystals and golden tokens? Because these mechanics are less familiar to me, I find them a bit harder to accept than a necklace that increases dexterity by five, or leveling up just making you more armored for no reason. Also, taking potions is fine with me. But when my heroes constantly eat stamina pills, I keep picturing them as a bunch of ninja drug addicts.

And that leads me into the story. This story is...is...indescribable. If you think about it too hard, your head might easily explode. I keep thinking that the translation must be to blame for something, and then the game confirms that...it said exactly what it meant. So you just have to accept that the garden of Eden was created by the Norse God Oden as a prison to trap his arch enemy...Nikola Tesla. Tesla is possessed by an electricity demon, and the garden of eden is defended by mechanical birds, because why not? It called Eden the realm of man at one point, so I was sure that I was dealing with a mistranslation, and this wasn't the actual garden of Eden from the Bible. ...And then I had to fight the forbidden fruit nymph who popped out of a stone apple and demanded that Adam be returned to her. I'm terrified that at some point Jesus is going to turn up, the game will confirm that pastor is the correct translation of the healer class, and the magical mermaid Aria is an Episcopalian. Is...is this normal? Are all Chinese fantasies like this? Or did the developers consume one too many stamina pills? To be fair, if you asked me to write something referencing Chinese mythological characters, I'm not sure I could even name a single one. I certainly couldn't come up with Tesla battling Oden. Anyway, excuse me while I fly my airplane to the city of the Sky Gods to...ummm...I actually forget what my goal is supposed to be. But whatever it is, I'm sure it'll involve fighting more evil robots.

Right, now onto the things that seem more like flaws. First off, all of the characters have voice acted introduction lines as you unlock them, and death quotes when they die in battle. I was a little disappointed that there isn't any English voice acting in the game, or even a text-based translation of the voice acted lines. I realize they're just flavour, but it'd still be nice.

Second, once you progress a little bit in the game, the automatic battles take forever! Yes, they do sound neat with headphones. But listening to them for ten minutes is excessive. It's possible that because I have two clerics in my party I keep healing, and so everything takes ages. Never the less, I often find myself starting a battle, putting down my phone, and wandering off to make lunch. It would be nice to speed these up or skip them or something.

Third, the game has dozens of systems, and they don't all feel as connected as I would like. There's some kind of territory system where I command my servants and upgrade my lands, multiple challenge towers and towers of trials (why is everything always a tower?), a couple of different pvp tournaments, a guild system with multiple activities (including something called "suppressing the guild nightmare"...does the guild have trouble sleeping or something? How do magical battles help it rest?), dispatch missions, dungeons to clear, monthly challenges, daily challenges, timed challenges, and probably more I'm forgetting. Each of these different things has different stats and levels, awards different tokens and coins and materials, and requires different upgrades. It doesn't always feel like upgrading one thing is effecting any of my massive variety of other things. Maybe it is, though, and I'm just confused. There are still lots of stats I have no idea what they do, and tons of orbs and crystals and currencies and tokens that I haven't even found a use for, yet.

In short, if you're in the mood for a long and sprawling game, with neat sound design, and a bunch of...stuff, check out Call of Fate. If you want a game where everything is balanced, and everyone has an equal chance at the leaderboards, or you're hoping for a story that makes sense, maybe give this one a pass.