Immersive Game’s Fort Commander: King’s Gambit is a twist to the tower defense genre. In fact, they twisted it so much you are not dealing anymore with towers but units. The game has Mogul Empire theme but it does lack enough “Mogulianess” in it. Sure the units has Mogul Empire written all over them, but that’s all to them. You are thrown into a war without knowing a thing about it.

The game has great graphics, not mind-blowing great, but it is great for its own sake. However, the main menu reminds me of a Sega Genesis game, not that it’s bad but it’s dull. Right after opening the game the game mechanics greets you, without finesse. You will then conclude right at the beginning that you’re in for a great disappointment.

The game has three modes: Campaign, Assault and Survival. In Campaign you will be suffering dryness like you are really in the deserts of South Asia. The gameplay is a watered-down Plants Versus Zombies. You place units along the grid where your fort and your enemy’s fort are right there facing each other, and your dispatching power is downright limited. You will have to choose between Archers, Cavalry, War Elephant and Swordsmen. Some of the units are to be unlocked and I won’t spoil it for you since you will have no reason at all to play this game given how limited the content of this game is.

Tar and Walls can also be built, Tar slows down the enemies and Walls literally stops the units from advancing. Both of them disintegrate, Tars disappear when certain number of units crawls (not literally) by them and Walls are broken down by the enemy units themselves.

You might be wondering how you gather resources for the cost of the units, Workers do that. They are like the sunflowers from Plant Versus Zombies, place them on the battleground and they’ll be gathering gold coins by raking the ground (and that is literal). Now the Campaign (the first one, again you’ll unlock the more “difficult” one and I won’t spoil it to you again) is so easy you’ll be finishing it for a LONG time. Why? There is no fast forward option, you’ll have to wait for everyone to die already even if your battlefield is already set to the point that there is no chance in hell that you’ll lose. Of course unless you sell all of your defensive units or forget to heal your units from time to time.

There is a bar for each sides, the moment that the bar is empty you lose if that is yours or you win if it’s from your opponent. The bars empty when an enemy unit successfully entered your fort (which is of course, impossible, unless you deliberately chose to lose). On the other side of the fence, everytime your enemy sends out a suicidal to your fort, their bar lessens.

Now, the Assault mode is really the only great thing in this game. Instead of putting down stationary units in the battle ground they attack the enemy’s fort. Your resources are time-based, a certain number of gold coins add to your stack as time ticks. To make matters challenging the enemy are also sending their units to your fort as opposed to “building” defenses as I initially thought of, meaning they’ll meet halfway and slug it out like how war is supposed to be. It’s challenging because you won’t spam units in one lane since there are no bonus gold coins for every successful soldier who infiltrates the enemy base. This mode is so complex I can’t even pin it down for you.

The Survival mode is like how Survival mode in other games is, though it’s more difficult than the unnecessarily lengthy Campaign. To end all of this, the game is already halfway there, it just stopped.

5/10