The Quest for Loot is a more accurate title
15 July 2013 | By Jamie Donnelly
The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is looking to carve a niche for itself, offering players both castle defense and dungeon-crawling in the same humour-filled, APRG package. It's an enticing proposition, especially considering the price tag of zero pounds that comes attached to its head, with Ubisoft following a typical free-to-play formula that allows players to purchase shortcuts to upgrades that other people must spend time getting.
It's a game that doesn't yet live up to its premise, and given the flaws in the core areas, may never do. The action-RPG portions are quick-fire affairs, giving you a few minutes to hack-and-slash your way through a castle fortified with traps and monsters as one of three character classes: a wizard, an archer, or a warrior. As is standard, you gain gold, loot and experience from your romps, which all go toward bettering your character so you can take on heftier challenges.
Setting up your castle to defend against the attack of other players is more enjoyable than the actual fighting part, and it's a shame you don't get too many opportunities to really play around with it. You've only got limited monster slots, meaning you have to make a trade-off between having a few powerful monsters, or lots of weaker ones. Some monsters also work better together, and you'll soon learn the most effective strategies for not just killing other players, but slowing them down too.
Speed is an important dimension, and it's where clever castle and trap design comes into play. You only have a couple of minutes to complete a castle if you want to loot the enemies treasure banks, meaning always being on the move. From a defensive stand point, this means you'll want to send enemy players on a convoluted route through corridors littered with traps that delay their charge, and place monsters that take a long time to take down.
It sounds good, but unfortunately it's plagued by small, niggling issues that just make everything feel stilted. You can't level-up while raiding a castle, meaning you can complete half a dungeon and get no experience points for it. You also can't swap or change abilities on the fly, which is frustrating considering the vastly different setups each dungeon can have. High-damage, single shot abilities are better for individual enemies, while you'll want crowd control for big groups of weaker enemies. You have to make this choice before you've even seen what lays in store for you, and going in with an ability set that doesn't suit what you're about to fight isn't ideal.
Everything you achieve in a castle is also only given to you once you've exited it, which slightly removes the satisfaction of immediately equipping your newest shiny toy or that rush that comes when you've grinded a new level. And that taps into a bigger problem that faces The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot - you never do feel satisfied on the character side. There's no real desire to equip your hero and level him up, and your primary focus will be on boosting your castle. It's missing that crucial desire to fight for the next level, and it's difficult to invest in the characters at your disposal.
The free-to-play systems give a clear advantage to players in the early stages, even if it's likely that they'll balance out by the latter stages. You'll easily be able to equip your castle with better monsters if you've got real cash to splash, leaving people on a similar level to you struggling to keep up. Likewise, you can just buy all the best loot for your level from the crafting store without having to scrimp and save for it, making dungeons far easier to run. Eventually, though, paying players will hit a ceiling of room and monster number caps, allowing those in the cheap seats to catch up. It's not ideal, but it does at least allow for the playing field to be balanced later on.
The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot feels like a missed opportunity. On paper it works; you take the standard dungeon-crawling APRG approach and flip it on its head, allowing players to fortify their own castles as well as raiding others. Both parts of the puzzle are individually too weak, even if they work well together, and it's difficult to see how it'll improve going forward when it just does too little to make you really invest in the characters you play as.
Most Anticipated Feature: The ability to set up your castle against other players' attacks is what makes this one stand out.
It's a game that doesn't yet live up to its premise, and given the flaws in the core areas, may never do. The action-RPG portions are quick-fire affairs, giving you a few minutes to hack-and-slash your way through a castle fortified with traps and monsters as one of three character classes: a wizard, an archer, or a warrior. As is standard, you gain gold, loot and experience from your romps, which all go toward bettering your character so you can take on heftier challenges.
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| Just a Cyclops practicing his dance moves |
Setting up your castle to defend against the attack of other players is more enjoyable than the actual fighting part, and it's a shame you don't get too many opportunities to really play around with it. You've only got limited monster slots, meaning you have to make a trade-off between having a few powerful monsters, or lots of weaker ones. Some monsters also work better together, and you'll soon learn the most effective strategies for not just killing other players, but slowing them down too.
Speed is an important dimension, and it's where clever castle and trap design comes into play. You only have a couple of minutes to complete a castle if you want to loot the enemies treasure banks, meaning always being on the move. From a defensive stand point, this means you'll want to send enemy players on a convoluted route through corridors littered with traps that delay their charge, and place monsters that take a long time to take down.
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| Limits make you think strategically about what defences you place |
It sounds good, but unfortunately it's plagued by small, niggling issues that just make everything feel stilted. You can't level-up while raiding a castle, meaning you can complete half a dungeon and get no experience points for it. You also can't swap or change abilities on the fly, which is frustrating considering the vastly different setups each dungeon can have. High-damage, single shot abilities are better for individual enemies, while you'll want crowd control for big groups of weaker enemies. You have to make this choice before you've even seen what lays in store for you, and going in with an ability set that doesn't suit what you're about to fight isn't ideal.
Everything you achieve in a castle is also only given to you once you've exited it, which slightly removes the satisfaction of immediately equipping your newest shiny toy or that rush that comes when you've grinded a new level. And that taps into a bigger problem that faces The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot - you never do feel satisfied on the character side. There's no real desire to equip your hero and level him up, and your primary focus will be on boosting your castle. It's missing that crucial desire to fight for the next level, and it's difficult to invest in the characters at your disposal.
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| Firestorms make everything look easy |
The free-to-play systems give a clear advantage to players in the early stages, even if it's likely that they'll balance out by the latter stages. You'll easily be able to equip your castle with better monsters if you've got real cash to splash, leaving people on a similar level to you struggling to keep up. Likewise, you can just buy all the best loot for your level from the crafting store without having to scrimp and save for it, making dungeons far easier to run. Eventually, though, paying players will hit a ceiling of room and monster number caps, allowing those in the cheap seats to catch up. It's not ideal, but it does at least allow for the playing field to be balanced later on.
The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot feels like a missed opportunity. On paper it works; you take the standard dungeon-crawling APRG approach and flip it on its head, allowing players to fortify their own castles as well as raiding others. Both parts of the puzzle are individually too weak, even if they work well together, and it's difficult to see how it'll improve going forward when it just does too little to make you really invest in the characters you play as.
Most Anticipated Feature: The ability to set up your castle against other players' attacks is what makes this one stand out.
