When I first played Chief Rebel’s Fellowship at Gamescom 2025, it immediately felt familiar.
It pretty much felt like I was dropped into World of Warcraft, also thanks to the game’s cartoony, colorful visuals, which are quite reminiscent of Blizzard’s MMORPG.
Yet, to be more precise, Fellowship reminded me of one of the many press demos I attended before the launch of an MMORPG expansion.
Usually, these sessions don’t put you out in the world to grind, do quests, and level up. Instead, they drop you straight into the expansion’s first dungeon together with a party of other players.
You get to fight through the dungeon without any preamble, kill a bunch of enemies until you reach a boss, kill that as well, and then rinse and repeat until you reach the final boss and complete the dungeon by dispatching it.
This is pretty much Fellowship in a nutshell: it’s not an MMORPG, but condenses an MMORPG-like dungeon experience into a neat, tight package designed to do away with all the parts that some (not yours truly, mind you) might consider slow or boring.
The resemblance to classic WoW-style MMORPGs isn’t limited to the dungeon structure. The foundation of Fellowship’s combat is heavily rooted in the Holy Trinity, with tanks keeping the enemies focused on them and acting as meat shields for the party, DPS (damage dealers) mowing down said enemies, and healers keeping everyone alive through the experience.
Each character you can pick is explicitly belonging to one of these categories, and this heavily influences its playstyle.
Since I usually play tanks in MMORPGs, I picked a tank character to play during my demo, and I felt right at home. Even the abilities were pretty much what you would expect from a similar archetype in WoW or Final Fantasy XIV.
To accentuate the sense of familiarity, my abilities were arranged in the traditional hotbar at the bottom of the screen and can be activated via keybinds or mouse clicks.
Yep. I played through this before, literally thousands of times.
Yet, don’t get me wrong. The fact that the basic gameplay isn’t particularly novel doesn’t mean that it isn’t fun.
Since Fellowship focuses entirely on the dungeon experience, it needs to be tight, and the dungeon I played was indeed tight and well-designed.
While the usual “trash mobs” (the common enemies between bosses, as MMO veterans call them) weren’t especially challenging, the boss fights were well-designed, challenging, and complex without being frustrating or complicated, and simply fun.
One of the elements that makes dungeons in MMORPGs potentially annoying is when the boss mechanics can’t be handled simply with good situational awareness and experience of the game in general. I’m talking about these bosses you need to go watch a guide to fight for the first time, unless you want to inconvenience your party because you don’t know what to do.
The Fellowship bosses I faced in a pirate-themed dungeon did not suffer from that problem. Their mechanics were complex but included the right amount of predictability so that you would know how to counter them if you kept your eyes open and paid attention.
I was surprised by one mechanic once, causing the only party wipe of my demo session, but what killed us was indeed not obscure or unpredictable. I simply let my guard down and got punished for it.
It was a fun experience, which left me wanting to play more.
Interestingly, the difficulty of the dungeon scales, but bosses don’t just get larger life bars, nor will they simply hit harder. They actually get completely new mechanics, with the intention of providing a fresh challenge when you fight them again.
Besides the dungeons, the game has a central hub called the “Stronghold,” where you can socialize, gear up, and get ready for the fight. It works pretty much like Destiny’s Tower.
Another similarity with Destiny is the fact that loot is gained in a chest at the end of each dungeon, and each player gets their own chest, so there’s no rolling for items, and everyone goes home happy.
Condensing an MMO-like experience into tight, instanced PvE dungeon runs is certainly an interesting bet, which will likely raise eyebrows for some and enthuse others.
We’ll have to wait and see whether the variety of dungeons and boss mechanics will keep the experience from becoming too repetitive, which only time will tell. That being said, what I played was fun, so the promise is certainly there.
Fellowship enters early access for PC via Steam on October 16, 2025. An open beta is currently happening and will end on September 23.
