I decided to revisit Horizon's gate again after years, since I never actually finished the game. I remembered how much I enjoyed the Final Fantasy style world combined with naval travel/combat, but I forgot entirely how in-depth the class/combat system was. I put 50 hours in originally and I'm ready to put that much in again.
The story isn't the most unique, but it is serviceable enough in respect to tossing you into this world. Secret conspiracy happens where your home country betrays and tries to have you killed, so now you must figure out why and/or get revenge by joining a new faction, building a fleet of ships and raising a powerful party of fighters, mages, sharpshooters, teleporting necromancers, dudes with trained bats, or more of the many unique classes available.
You start off pretty weak, and the world can be unforgiving if you aren't careful. Every party member your recruit starts with just the sailor class, but then can unlock the warrior, scout or scholar classes that each have HUGE branching class trees underneath them. These more advanced classes require you to gain xp with 2 or more earlier classes, as well as finding the skill trainer in the world to unlock them. These aren't necessarily straight upgrades from earlier classes every time, and they usually specialize more the further you go down the tree. For example, the sorcerer class is an upgrade from scholar with powerful AoE spells, but these spells have casting times that can cause enemies to step out of the AoE before they trigger. Scholar spells hit one space immediately. Sorcerer is stronger, but requires better planning and positioning. Some of the late-game classes have insanely powerful skills and fun playstyles, like the teleporting warpblade class for example.
Ship combat is so much fun. Your ship's weapons, facing and distance are all accounted for in a way that still keeps the turn-based combat fast paced. Cannons have a firing arc that the enemy has to be in, so moving your ship to have it in range AND facing the right direction is important. Boarding is a little tricky at first; it essentially gives you around 2 turns of party-based combat on the enemy ship, and then the survivors return to their ships and naval combat continues. You can board again afterwards and keep whittling away at their crew, but this can take a while if you're not prepared to do so. There is a lot of variety of ships and weapons for them that making a whole can include specializing certain ships to certain tasks like ramming/boarding/sniping.
Each port has a trade good it sells that you can sell to other ports to make cash slowly but surely at first, and then it can snowball into a massive fortune as you build a trading fleet and find the right goods to sell to the right places. On top of that, you can recruit new crew members at each town's cafe, as well as have a morale boosting local meal that also provides a unique party buff for a time. You can replace your ship or add another one to your fleet at the shipyard, which will have different ships available depending on the town you're in, its current wealth status, and your loyalty to its parent faction. Then each town may have skill trainers, unique locations for quests, blacksmiths for augmenting your gear, or lucrative research traders/cartographers that will reward you handsomely for exploring the world and identifying literally everything.
The whole world is open to you from the start and there are so many different avenues to accruing your wealth to fund your fleet that it's almost overwhelming. In a way it's nice that such a simple game can find ways to be wildly complex. I'm absolutely addicted to creating new class combinations with new crew members just to see what's fun. Everything can be powerful if played right, but there's a lot of rule-of-cool available in Horizon's gate. Do I want the bigger, stronger ship, or do I want to keep the one that has a magical artifact that lets it shooting a beam of lightning through multiple ships? I could do more damage with my gladiator if I gave him a flail instead of a whip, but the whip has range and makes me feel like simon belmont.
I love this game so much, and I think it's well worth the price of 20 bucks. I haven't quite played a turn based tactics game that gives you this much versatility with your party members. The narrative could improve in a future sequel that I hope Rad Codex makes, but the core gameplay is amazing. Easy to learn, hard to master, harder to make up your mind about perfect team composition!
