![]() ![]() I don’t know if the slow start could have been fixed. I remember when playing Hollow Knight that fans kept assuring me that I’d be “opening up the game any minute now.” Well, that really does happen in SteamWorld Quest. It turns what feels like a gimmicky system into the world’s most entertaining combat laboratory. You’ll also have acquired more cards by this point and the ability to create even more. You don’t even get a taste of the potential until you open the third and especially the fourth character of the game, at which point you can dump main character Armilly and her boring ass moves. The combat system’s eventual wealth of complexity is nowhere to be seen at the start of the game, and what you do start with gives no sign of the greatness to come. The truth is, I was bored at the start of Quest. I had to voluntarily nerf her by switching to a different weapon (which changes the bonus combo card you get) just to create my own challenge on normal difficulty. I stacked her with no-cost cards, including one that allowed me to draw extra cards my next turn, and absolutely annihilated battles. ![]() In fact, she was, to me, the true star of the game. It essentially renders damage to all your characters null and void for a few turns. See the chick in the witch’s hat in the center? That’s her special combo card when you use three of her cards when she’s equipped with certain weapons. See the blue bars in my health meters above? That’s probably the most over-powered tactic in the game. ![]() ![]() It’s a rich, satisfying combat system that never gets boring and can be adapted to anyone’s play style. Or, if you use three of a single hero’s cards, you get a bonus 4th card separate from the ones included in your deck with a desirable special effect or attack. It’s clever and works well, but SteamWorld Quest goes the extra mile by including cards that cooperate tag team-style with each-other. If the card has no cost, it adds a counter to a charge meter that you spend on the priced, more powerful cards. The real novelty is that each card either comes free or at a cost. They might be attacks, or defensive maneuvers, or special moves that will come into play later in the fight. Each turn, you pick three of them to use. When a battle begins, you’re randomly dealt a mixture of six cards from all the heroes. The idea is you construct a deck of eight cards for each hero you have. Part of that has to do with the writing, which I’ll get to in a bit. It doesn’t help that SteamWorld Quest gets off to a start so slow that the jump from prokaryotes to eukaryotes looks tame in comparison. Do you know what the difference is? It’s based on the actual physical card game. hOD7y4yZmZĪnd yes, for those who follow me on Twitter, I play Magic: The Gathering and enjoyed the Steam version of it. SteamWorld Quest wakes up at 7AM but doesn't get out of bed until 8AM. But seriously, I think the second level of Ac!d is still stuck loading. If any card-based game had potential to hook me, it was the Metal Gear Acid games, but it turns out I was hoodwinked and they’re actually a series of load screens interrupted by a brief card-based tactical RPG snippets. I even tried Eye of Judgement (the gimmicky PlayStation AR game) because, hey look, real cards! It sucked. Before it, I tried Lost Kingdoms on the GameCube, was bored sick, gave the “improved” sequel a try and thought they made it worse. As a teenager who had just gotten hugely into RPGs and was starving for games for it, I couldn’t even like Baten Kaitos. I loved Kingdom Hearts, but hated Chain of Memories. I hate card-based attack systems in games. My cynicism was based their chosen combat scheme. You know Brjann, it’s hard to test the legitimacy of our friendship if you don’t make a game I can dislike. SteamWorld Quest is the most fun I’ve had playing an indie RPG. When I heard about that, my first visceral thought was “well, they were due to have a game suck anyway.” When I saw SteamWorld Quest unveiled, I was like “oh, well that’ll be different.” But I didn’t find out about the card-based attack system until right before I started playing it. I think maybe he might have told me they’d be following SteamWorld Dig 2 with an RPG, but if he did I forgot. So I didn’t know all that much about today’s game until very recently. I think it’s sort of unethical for a critic to get too hyped for a game that they’re going to cover. And since I take my critic duties seriously, I don’t talk about their projects still in development with him. No matter my opinion, our friendship remains unchanged. Brjann and I have an understanding: he makes the games, I review the games. But I’m not sure what that does for a developer besides giving me a direct line to let them know all the numerous ways they fuck up their games. Disclosure time: Image & Form top dog Brjann Sigurgeirsson (a name that sounds like someone began to sneeze mid-pronunciation) is a friend of mine. ![]()
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