Image & Form have always been at their best when they mix ingredients from wildly different gaming genres, settings and mechanics. From the "metroidvania spaghetti western with robots" of SteamWorld Dig 2 to the "robot space pirates in turn-based tactical combat" of SteamWorld Heist, this team thinks out of the box, and gave us a few great games in the process. SW Quest, however, might beImage & Form have always been at their best when they mix ingredients from wildly different gaming genres, settings and mechanics. From the "metroidvania spaghetti western with robots" of SteamWorld Dig 2 to the "robot space pirates in turn-based tactical combat" of SteamWorld Heist, this team thinks out of the box, and gave us a few great games in the process. SW Quest, however, might be the point where they push that formula too far. It's not quite a shark jump, but it is a bit of a disappointment.
The problems of Quest begin with its setting and artwork. OK, this time it's "robots in a fantasy world"–but that theme doesn't work nearly as well as the previous ones. To hammer this square peg in the round hole of the SteamWorld universe, the story frames the entire game as a bedtime story told by Gabriel (one of Heist's protagonists) to his kid–a pretty artificial and tired device. The story is also overwritten and annoying. Where Heist's characters managed to elicit affection with a few rare lines of optional dialogue, Quest tries to hammer home its protagonists with lengthy conversations and a story that piles up one cliched trope after the other. The characters could have spiced the recipe, but they don't. While the robots in earlier SteamWorld games oozed charme, the ones in Quest are cute at best, and frankly ugly at worst. (Also: I love the mashup of themes, but "robot japanese warrior mystical fantasy hero" is starting to feel like you're ignoring the theme and mashing up random stuff.)
The core talent of Image & Form are their game mechanics, that usually borrow from different sources to produce a fresh and perfectly balanced mix. SW Quest is a bit of a disappointment in that respect, too. A mix between a card game and an RPG sounds like a great idea–and in the best moments of the game, it is. You have multiple characters, each with its own deck of cards. Configuring your team and building your decks is pretty pleasant, and it feels good to play a sequence of cards that work well together. (Like: Character 1 casts a poison spell on Character 2's sword; Character 2 hits and poisons enemy; Character one casts an "Infection" spell that spreads the "poisoned" state to the other enemies). Those spikes of adrenaline are a highlight, but most fights end up being pretty boring.
Here is what I think is the main problem with the game mechanics: you don't know exactly what kind of enemies you'll face until you start fighting. At that point, you cannot reconfigure your team and decks. That's probably a way to keep you on your toes, but it ends up feeling like you're at mercy of randomness. Sometimes, you can spot one or two of the enemies before you fight them, and sometimes you can't. Once you get into a fight, you can find yourself in a number of remarkably unfunny situations, like a fight that drags on for fifteen minutes in a pointless tug-of-war of damage and healing, or a battle that could be stupidly easy with the right team of characters and instead ends up being artificially hard, just because you don't happen to have the right team or cards.
Those quagmireish fights are painful because you can't even backtrace easily. In theory, you could abandon the fight, take a round of pummeling, and come back with different characters or decks–but the important fights prevent you from doing that. The other option is quitting the game, that sends you back to the previous checkpoint–and the checkpoints are very unevenly spaced. At one point, I went through four or five long and pretty boring fights, only to suddenly stumble upon a boss that was immune to all the attacks that I had in my decks. After suffering through a few pointless rounds, I had to quit, start over from the previous checkpoint, and go through all those unremarkable fights again. Moments like those made me wish that the game would be over soon.
I realize that I've been quite critical of this game. However, all that being said, I still finished SW Quest, and I didn't drop it until I'd beaten it. There is something addictive in it, which makes me think that the folks at Image & Form haven't lost their touch after all. It's hard to tell whether they've become complacent, or whether Quest is just a bump in the career of these gaming autheurs–like the lackluster album from your favourite band that you never listen to, except for that one good song. We can still hope that the next game from Image & Form will be another great one like Dig, or even another masterpiece like Heist.… Expand
SteamWorld Quest: Hand of GilgamechYour Score0 out of 10User Score
