Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune is a Metroidvania with some great ideas | Hands-on Preview

2022 was a year packed to the absolute gills with Metroidvania games. In fact, it’s a genre that has been growing and growing for a while, bulging at the seams with fresh ideas. The overall blueprint is so simple to follow that it allows for a great deal of experimentation in terms of combat, progression and level design. Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune doesn’t shake up the formula too much, but it does have some interesting ideas.

Sliding into Steam Early Access, Fortune Hunter is a follow up to Tower Hunter, a game developed a few years back by four-person outfit IceSitruuna. At the time Tower Hunter felt ambitious, but lacked a real hook to set it apart from the games that influenced it, most notably Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

In this new edition, Erza has received her hunting licence (I’m not sure what she’s actually hunting, to be honest; she mostly just obliterates whatever she finds while strolling through the forest) and is off an an exploratory mission through a dense field of otherworldly fog. Shot down, her ship comes to rest in a beautiful but deadly forest, and it’s up to Erza and her two allies, Ciara and Nia, to go and do whatever it is that needs doing. Mostly brutally killing the local wildlife and collecting an almost staggeringly vast array of fruits, flowers and animal parts.

While Fortune Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune borrows the costume swapping fun of Bloodstained, it does have a few fresh ideas. Notably the aforementioned ingredients and reagents are used to craft or upgrade weapons, trinkets and armour for the three heroes.

You primarily play as Erza, fresh from a live Twitch-style broadcast and raring to whip out her katana and start eviscerating sleeping hedgehogs and such. Well, she would, only the wildlife is pretty damn dangerous and, frankly, follows no theme whatsoever. From giant mutant bugs to zombies, carnivorous plants, zombies with swords and shields, and killer bird people, Erza faces everything with the same giddy anime optimism that can only come from knowing you have the biggest, sliciest katana in the forest.

You can easily switch to the other characters with a push of the right stick. Ciara is probably my favourite, whose fluid kick combos feel incredibly satisfying and who can whip out an enormous Gatling gun or rocket launcher at a moment’s notice. Nia on the other hand is slower but stronger, packing a mean punch but feeling less immediate and fluid in her attacks.

Combat is actually very enjoyable. Moving through the stages is easy enough, but the early access build contains nine bosses that will test you far beyond anything in the preceding levels. Each has multiple health bars with increasingly tough attack patterns that change throughout the fight. Each of the three girls has their own health bar, so you can essentially save a switch until you’ve no choice and conserve your health that way.

Standard attack combos are fun enough, but special moves are activated with fighting game inputs that don’t always flow as they should but feel pretty cool to pull off mid-fight. There’s also an array of special ranged attacks, some of which can open doors to new areas. You don’t unlock new abilities by beating bosses, but rather by progressing the story and exploring.

Erza’s Wheel of Fortune is a pretty looking game so far, although some of the backdrops, while vivid and certainly eye-catching, are a little too static and artificial. Animations are decent, though, and there’s an element of comedy to the writing that remains entertaining even when it gets a little too close to lewd. Erza has a demon-possessed hairpin called Diablo for some anime reason or another, who longs for a body of his own and tends to ask inappropriate questions about Erza’s shower habits, for example.

Ultimately, Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune impressed me a lot. I played it primarily on Steam Deck where it performed very well, and was immediately comfortable with the combat and the exploration. Right now it’s only in Japanese and there are some difficulty balance issues, particularly where the bosses are concerned, but they’re my only real complaints and one of them is just a preference. There’s a lot of potential here for the full release, and I’m excited to see how Erza’s journey turns out.

Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune is currently available via Steam Early Access.