Review of Fate Trigger: The Novita Closed Alpha Test

If I had to describe Fate Trigger: The Novita in a few words it would be “PUBG with waifus and pantyshots.” For the past few days, I had a chance to play the Closed Alpha test of this game. Was I good at it? Absolutely not, but something about it kept me interested for almost 24 hours of playtime.

This newest game from Tencent’s Saroasis Studios is described as free-to-play, but judging from the test run, players will be able to spend money on cosmetics for the playable characters, cars, and weapons.

System Requirements

First off, the technical details. Fate Trigger: The Novita does require somewhat beefy specs, even beefier if you have a laptop. In my case. the game ran fairly smoothly with only one crash (that may have been caused by my alt-tabbing). For the record, I played on an Asus ROG Strix G513 laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 6800H, 3060 Nvidia GeForce (6GB), 40 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM (8GB+32GB), and I’m running Windows 10. The laptop system requirements are not listed on the Steam page but were sent to Anime Corner in an email along with the access code:

Gameplay and Playable Characters

Fate Trigger: The Novita is played in teams of four, combined into 25 teams for 100 players. Players can choose from 7 offered characters, divided into four roles (damage dealers (4) and one healer, scout, and shielder). Each one of them comes with a unique skill set and you can not have two of the same characters on the team. Eventually, you’ll all end up shooting anyway so it’s best to pick a character that works the best for you. The arena, or “Airena” as they call it, gradually shrinks over time thanks the effect named Pale Blight.

At first, I was underwhelmed with the kit options as most felt unfinished, which is normal for Alpha. However, this game definitely had a learning curve and by the third day, players were running around doing incredible things with Kira (the bunny girl who provides shields and can summon a tower). Personally, I found my calling with Camille, an android healer who can revive players from further away, while healing and providing security. Her ultimate felt unfinished but as the game has a few annoying mechanics that knock you out and you are unable to get up until your teammate helps, her powers came in quite handy.

As far as the damage dealers go, their kits were somewhat underwhelming. Ultimately, you don’t have much of a reason to use them and it can be difficult to pick the right moment. Huxley, the only scout, was pretty solid: her powers could detect enemies, and her ultimate made it difficult to see anything (for all teams).

Each match begins by choosing a landing point. This is a decent idea, but sometimes people don’t think things through as it’s easy to get killed without proper equipment. The first game you play is apparently always with bots and it’s quite easy to win. Before you start playing you have to choose a server. I ended up choosing North America because I figured it would mainly attract people who speak English. But, at certain points, it felt like they were mixing people from various locations as I’d often and up in games with people from China and Japan. My ping on average was displayed as 200ms, but I can’t say I experienced that much lag. One of the players mentioned it seemed like a visual glitch because he had a similar experience.

Regarding the players, the game allows you to voice chat with your teammates or players close to you. It’s kind of difficult to find people who use a microphone so you have to type. The in-game chat was on the left side, in the middle of the screen. It wasn’t that easy to follow as the font was tiny and it displayed all match updates along with the messages. There was no filter for profanity and although most players I met were nice and polite, a few needed a timeout (or a ban for good measure).

In my 20ish hours of gameplay I only encountered one player who was killing teammates but either running them over or shooting them. The game does have a report function but it was a bit difficult to find. Not sure if anything came out of the ban as I haven’t encountered them for the third time.

Speaking of running people over, the Fate Trigger: The Novita has two types of vehicles: a four-seater Lada-looking blue car and a sci-fi two-seater. Driving is smooth and you can even fly over cracks on the map, but you can also run people over (even if on the same team) and you can blow up other cars, which is kinda cool. You can even get cosmetics to personalize your ride and you can refuel the cars, but in my experience, they never last that long. The best feature: you can honk at others to get in. 10/10 right there.

Character Design

Each of the Awakeners (characters) you play as has a name, backstory, and available skins, which I’m assuming will be how this game makes money. While I’m glad it’s not a gacha, I feel like they need a bit more work for me to be willing to spend real money to dress them up. The clothes generally vary from basically naked to covered but very tight-fitted.

The jiggle physics in the game were a bit much at times. I get that the targeted player base might be more likely to spend but at least make it make sense. Below you can see a screenshot of the characters waiting to land: as you can see they are literally flying through the air and their hair is flapping towards the player, but at the same time there is an upstream strategically positioned to lift their skirts up. How?

The voice acting was pretty good with a decent variety of voice lines. Nase (the bunny girl) is voiced by Brianna Knickerbocker, who you may know as Hu Tao from Genshin Impact. All I could ever hear was Hu Tao, even though the characters couldn’t be any more different. Players in your team will give you updates through characters’ voice lines (e.g. spotted enemy, let’s go there, time to heal, etc.).

Oh yeah, I don’t know if other characters had this, but if you play as Huxley you can execute enemies by stepping on them.

Weapons and Items

I have to admit I was completely overwhelmed by the weapon system. You run around, picking up guns, upgrades for the guns, gear, backpacks, grenades, and some upgrades you can buy by stealing Supply Points or earning them, but ultimately there is no guide or a description for what feels good. It’s a trial-and-error system and you can pick what works well for you.

I liked the automatic picking up of the items if you have space, but it was quite annoying that the grenades weren’t picked up automatically. I had some minor bugs with scopes that would get stuck on weapons when I tried to use them (the whole screen zoomed in, blurry, unable to switch back) but overall it wasn’t a huge deal.

What Needs to Be Improved?

Honestly? A lot. I understand this was only an Alpha Closed Test, but I would say optimization is the biggest one. As I said, the game requires a really beefy computer and I feel there are competitors who do it better. 100 players per game feels like a lot, but the numbers go down quickly and the fighting “Airena” shrinks over time, pushing everyone together. However, allowing people to choose smaller matches would not only speed them up but also help with the optimization issues.

Map variety would be nice and a lot of visual components could be improved. I had a hard time seeing the chat and character descriptions because there was almost no contrast.

Some kind of a practice run to test out various weapons would also help new players. While finalizing this review, I noticed that they have a lot of information on the official website, which I didn’t think to check while playing. Making this more accessible in the game would be nice. I noticed they implemented some of the feedback people reported over the duration of the test, so I guess they are listening to the surveys and reports.

This test had two currencies you could use to buy various cosmetics, including character skins, as well as a season pass you could level up. This is a common gacha tactic to have quite a few different things players can buy and spend in-game, so I’ll be curious to see where it goes. Hopefully, they stick to only cosmetics that don’t add exclusive boosts and skills.

Overall, Fate Trigger: The Novita’s Alpha Test had its issues but I still quite enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it in the future.

For more information on the lore, you can visit the Fate Trigger: The Novita website.