Titanium Court is certainly not like other games. Its gameplay loop is a truly bizarre mix of Match-3 and RTS/autobattling that is presented through an interface with the insane color palette of an 80’s adventure game. Its story casts you as a mortal who has become trapped in a fairy court and made their Queen, and everything about the plot is firmly rooted in the whimsy and nonsense logic of fairies. Whatever your feelings on it are, Titanium Court will be memorable.
An average session of Titanium Court is also a little bit of a roguelite in the vein of something like Hades. You start with a visual novel/adventure segment in which you’re able to wander around the Court and find people to talk to. They will usually talk about one of the games running jokes (sports, misunderstanding signs, not believing in cars) and possibly say something incomprehensible about the plot. The writing is great and most jokes land, but because every character is so intensely obtuse about everything, it’s often hard to tell which conversations matter and what info is worth remembering. As much as it perfectly fits the style of mythical fairies, it’s also frustrating when you just want to be able to tell if you’re progressing the game. Things generally just seem to happen without clear reasons or warnings.
After a while of that, you’ll run out of things to do at Court and the game will tell you it’s time to go to war. Battles consist of a short period in which you play Match-3 to get resources, eliminate enemy spawners, and set up favorable terrain, followed by using your resources to deploy your own units and spells, and finally watching everyone fight it out for 30 seconds. The system works great for a bit, but it won’t take you long to realize that standard battles only have about 5 different enemy units and that battlefields only change by including volcanoes or lacking certain terrain types. Multi-battle events that show up in some runs aren’t enough to stop it from quickly feeling like you’re just doing the same thing over and over again. Other roguelites get past a lack of run variety by making the core gameplay very engaging. Titanium Court might be that for you if you’re really into Match-3, but for me the matching just felt like a gimmick that got in the way of being able to strategize rather than a fun puzzle.
I think the plot is supposed to be what holds your interest long-term, which is usually how Fellow Traveler games work. Titanium Court does make a good effort here. Like I said earlier, the humor generally lands and it really does an excellent job of writing fairies that feel straight out of Shakespeare or medieval legends. Unfortunately, it just moves at a glacial pace. Most content feels irrelevant to the plot even if it’s funny, and the segments where things are clearly moving forward only happen at the end of winning runs and amount to getting a vague answer to a single question. It’s mysterious and thematically fitting, but not satisfying. I’ve heard that the plot eventually develops into some kind of meta-commentary on how games get stale if you exhaust all of their content. That theme hadn’t shown up at all by the time I lost interest, so I can’t say if it’s worth sticking around for. Comments in the Steam discussions suggest it’s divisive and that there are a ways to be permanently locked into an underwhelming ending. Make of that what you will.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Titanium Court is the sort of game that will be the greatest thing ever for some people and just an interesting failed experiment for a lot of others. I’m definitely in the latter camp. I’m not going to forget it anytime soon, but I also have no desire to match any more threes. The good news is that the first two hours of the game are extremely representative of what I saw in the next four, so if you don’t like what you’re seeing after playing that long, you can safely refund without worrying about missing anything. I took a little longer than that to start feeling the repetition, but I probably would have stopped earlier if I knew how slow it was going to be about unlocks. Alas.
Rating: 65%
Time to beat: I lost interest after 6 hours. It sounds like some endings are reachable in 8, but full completion takes at least twice as long as that.
Price: $15
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
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