Developer: Torus Games
Publisher: Maximum Games
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One, iOS
Beast Quest – Review
Back when Lionhead studios was acquired by Microsoft, and the Fable series was at its height, Peter Molyneux got an erection every time he screwed over an IP and the studio connected to it. Lionhead closed, and we lost some great titles, but for our story, most importantly: Fable. Long since forgotten, the feeling of the once amazing franchise is given a new lease on life with Beast quest. They are attempting to recapture the feeling of exploration and wonder we all collectively got, but then subsequently lost. In this age of nostalgia, is it always as good as we want it to be? Lets find out with Beast Quest!
Story
Playing around in a burnt field, you start your adventure in the kingdom of Avantia. Running around a bit you stumble over a magical key in a knight’s gauntlet. Appearing before you is the wizard Aduro, telling you of the properties of that key and what kinds of adventures you’re about to embark on. And if any of these places and characters seem at all familiar to you, then you must be well read indeed, as the story is based on a series of books by the same name. Now with a lot of media based on other media there are always discrepancies between the source material and its target. Unfortunately we cannot comment on these differences as we’re not intimate enough with the source material.
Graphics
Beast quest reminds us a lot of the fable era of games, with sprawling cities, interesting NPCs and stuff to do, except it also feels like it was ported to iOS and then back to PC. And that is actually the case indeed, Beast quest used to be an iOS game. This comes with a lot of implications for the graphical fidelity of the game. The ground lacks texture, the characters and animations feel stiff, and enemies feel dead before you kill them with their pretty static idle animations. There is also not a lot of room for animations and interesting movement stuff on screen, giving some hilarious solutions for when the game doesn’t know what to do. One of our favorites is when the player jumps to a place where the game doesn’t expect you to be, you just float and crouch to a point where you can land again.
Sound
Because there is so little to the game, you’ll get a nice good listen to the audio this title comes with, which will get somewhat annoying as it goes on. The music loops are reasonable to listen to at first, but after a while you’ll start hearing it over and over again, even appearing at the final boss building no suspense to the anticlimactic fight. The voice acting is good, if somewhat dry sounding, but the main character sounds so amazed at the adventure he is on that it almost makes us forgive the lack of other background noise. Other than that, the NPC quest-givers don’t even have flavor lines when you talk to them, and just feel really creepy waving their arms wildly and moving their mouths with nothing to complete the conversation.
Gameplay
As an action adventure game, Beast Quest has a lot of flaws related to it being an iOS port in the gameplay department. As we’ve already discussed in the graphics section of the review, there is a hilarious situation with the player being able to jump over whole sections of the map if there is room because the game doesn’t know how to handle players being in places they’re not supposed to be. Combat still plays like its iOS counterpart, with the dodge mechanic feeling like you should have to swipe instead, and even the sidestepping mechanic and its arrows being taken straight from mobile. Even walking around feels like a slog due to problems with ports and people with two monitors will have an extremely hard time as your mouse doesn’t stick to the screen and we paused our YouTube videos on a multitude occasions trying to look to around the character.
Combat isn’t that much involved either, you have the usual fast and heavy attacks and block and dodge actions, and then you can sidestep to hopefully reach other enemies in the fight. Occasionally after breaking your fingers on the mouse buttons or triggers you get a special attack that will summon an ally to come do one big attack and then they’ll leave again waiting for you to spam your mouse some more. Enemy variety is the same pool of generic wolves, spiders, bandits, bats, and other standard fantasy creatures. A little bit later on in the game’s story you’ll start upgrading your weapons, armor, and you’ll even get a magical attack or two to slay enemies with, but you’ll only really need your weapon to be upgraded as you’ll quickly start sneezing enemies apart and there will be no more need for dodging and blocking. Even the final boss of the game was dispatched extremely quickly with a couple of ally attacks and some slight switching of positions. There is no difficulty to this title, which we suspect is also a remnant of its mobile history.
Conclusion
The storyline of beast quest has the potential to bring a cool adventure to players, but it is being held back by its roots as a cheap iOS port that they slapped keyboard and mouse controls on. We couldn’t even properly use the menus because we couldn’t see the cursor, and the advertised controller support is nowhere to be seen except for on the PS4 and Xbox versions of the game. Looking at this game’s trailer got us building hope for a fun Fable-like experience, but instead we got a mediocre cashgrab port that should have better stayed on iOS, or even better just as a series of books. We’d rather go back to the Lionhead studio days.
Beast Quest - Review,
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[…] Beast Quest might not ring much of a bell for all of our readers, but over in the UK, it’s a pretty big deal. With almost 120 books published between 2007 and now (and more yet to be written) it is a pretty popular fantasy series for children age seven and up. In 2018 a game based on the books, developed by Torus Games, made its way onto Steam, Xbox One and Playstation 4, which allowed the player to delve into the Beast Quest world and go on their own adventure to save Avantia from being overrun by corrupted creatures. Now it has been announced that Nintendo Switch players can also soon enjoy Beast Quest, as it will be released for this console on November 15. Our review for this game can be read here. […]