FATE

Long before "action RPG" meant Diablo clones fighting for shelf space, FATE quietly became one of the most-played games of its era for a reason most of its players never fully registered at the time: WildTangent bundled it as a free trial on an enormous number of prebuilt PCs throughout the mid-to-late 2000s. Reviewers describe discovering it exactly that way, over and over, in strikingly similar terms — a game encountered in five-minute increments on a family computer, or during dial-up-era boredom, that stuck in memory for two decades. Its Steam release, arriving eight years after the original 2005 launch, gives that entire generation a way to revisit it properly, and the response has been overwhelming.

A shared memory as much as a game

What sets FATE's review sample apart from most games this fleet covers is how much of it reads as collective memory rather than conventional critique. Reviewers recall the game's fishing minigame, its slot-machine-style gambling feature ("purple coins" into "a virtual slot machine," as one reviewer fondly puts it), and a loyal pet companion that can be sent back to town to sell loot while the player keeps exploring — specific, distinctive systems that clearly left a real impression rather than blending into generic ARPG mechanics. Underneath the nostalgia is a genuinely solid game: procedurally generated dungeons that regenerate endlessly, a satisfying loot-and-leveling loop, and — as multiple reviewers point out directly — a clear, acknowledged lineage to Torchlight, whose developers built on ideas FATE established years earlier.

Real, specific complaints about this particular port

Set against that affection is a smaller but genuinely useful thread of technical criticism aimed specifically at the Steam version rather than the game itself. One detailed reviewer who owned the original CD release reports the Steam port performing noticeably worse during intensive combat — frame-rate drops when summoning the maximum number of monsters or casting demanding spells like the area-effect meteor strike — and separately notes that console commands well-known to the original PC community have been stripped out of this release entirely. That's a specific, checkable claim about version differences rather than a vague "this feels dated" complaint, and it's worth knowing for anyone who specifically remembers the original build's exact feature set rather than just the game's broad strokes.

A concern about a different product, reported carefully

A separate, more serious concern appears in one review: an allegation that a mobile version of FATE, published under the game's current rights holder gamigo group, collects an unusually aggressive amount of personal data — including precise location and browsing history — while advertising itself as free with paid unlocks. This concerns a different product on a different platform, not the Steam release being reviewed here, and this review could not independently verify the specific claims made about that mobile app's data practices. It's reported here exactly as what it is: one reviewer's specific but unverified allegation about a related but separate release from the same publisher, worth knowing about but not something this review treats as established fact about the game under discussion.

Twenty years later, still a living franchise

FATE's own public activity confirms it hasn't just been quietly re-released and forgotten. The franchise marked its 20th anniversary in May 2025 with dedicated promotional activity, and a new entry, "FATE: Reawakened," released the following March — real, current evidence that the franchise's rights holder continues to see commercial life in the property rather than treating this Steam listing as a one-off legacy cash-in.

What the completion data suggests

Steam's achievement data offers a useful, if modest, read on how far the nostalgia carries actual long-term play. The easiest tracked achievement sits at a strong 84.2%, but the curve declines fairly steadily rather than showing a healthy long tail — several mid-tier achievements around gear collection and combat mastery sit in the 30-45% range, and the deepest tracked achievement falls to under 8%. That's a reasonably normal shape for a game this old and this casual in its core design, and it doesn't point to any specific broken system the way a hard cliff would — it reads as consistent with a game most buyers enjoy for a meaningful stretch without necessarily chasing full completion, which tracks with how many reviewers frame their own relationship to it: revisited fondly in bursts rather than min-maxed to the end.

A simple structure that still supports real variety

Part of why FATE's loop holds up is that its character options, while simple by modern standards, genuinely change how a playthrough feels. Reviewers describe experimenting across melee, ranged and spellcasting-focused builds, each pulling from the same endlessly regenerating dungeon but demanding different approaches to the same encounters — enough that several reviewers specifically mention starting fresh characters just to try a different build rather than treating a first playthrough as definitive. Combined with the procedurally generated dungeon layout itself, that gives a game this old and this simple in its presentation more genuine replay value than its modest scope might suggest at a glance.

Where it lands

FATE earns its Overwhelmingly Positive reception honestly: it's a genuinely well-designed, addictive action-RPG that happens to also be a shared cultural touchstone for a huge number of players who first met it as an unassuming trial on someone else's computer. The specific, credible complaints about this Steam port's performance and missing console commands are real enough to flag clearly rather than wave away, but they describe a rougher version of a great game rather than a broken one — and for the price, that's an easy trade for most of the people this review's own sources describe.