Developer: Brain Seal Ltd
Publisher: Brain Seal Ltd
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One
Tested on: PC
Dark Quest 2 – Review
If you’re a fan of the board game Hero Quest, we recommend you continue reading. As you may know, Brain Seal Ltd created a new game called Dark Quest 2, now available to all your players on Steam, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4. From the looks of it, Dark Quest 2 is a great improvement of its predecessor from 2015. But hey, we’re not here to judge a book by its cover so let’s dive into it.
Story
The king hosted a celebration for the whole kingdom. Unfortunately, an evil sorcerer, together with his orcs and minions, dug tunnels beneath the castles and attacked from below. Monsters from another dimension were summoned and all men, women, and children were butchered in the night. Only the people who stayed in the village survived. Now it’s up to your heroes to enter the castle and face madness, horror, and death in order to eventually defeat the evil sorcerer and his minions.
The story brought to us in Dark Quest 2 is nothing special, let’s face it. The way it is brought isn’t either. A guard is holding a piece of old paper with the story written on it. Quite boring, actually. After this brief introduction to the story, you travel to the castle and get another short piece of the story. A goblin warns his master that the heroes are coming to the castle, and your adventure begins. Luckily, this second introduction part is less boring, but feels more cheesy and weird, seeing as the movements of the drawn goblin and wizard are weird.
Graphics
As mentioned above, the introduction doesn’t get a lot of credit for its graphics. However, this changes when the actual gameplay starts. The art style here is described as an isometric hand-drawn art style and it’s simply beautiful. The characters have their own unique looks, setting them apart easily. The monsters you encounter are all greenish and do look alike, and remind a little of the orcs in Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, fighting these cool creatures is a real joy.
Sound
So there are two places: the tunnels and the village. In the village, you get peaceful and quiet music while you’re doing your business there. The music isn’t attracting a lot of attention, which feels correct. Then there are the tunnels. The soundtrack changes here to a more adventure-ish kind of theme. Tension and a little bit of mystery are thrown in, making you more excited for your quests.
Gameplay
Dark Quest 2 is a turn-based RPG inspired by the board game Hero Quest. The game is available in both single player and multiplayer.
You start your journey in the first quest with one hero, a barbarian. Your goal is to find the exit out of the dungeon. After you manage to find the exit, you go back to the village. In the village, you can visit multiple people who will offer various interesting options. You can rest at the tavern to restore missing health points, learn new spells, buy potions, resurrect dead heroes, get new heroes, and of course, start new quests.
Let’s take a look at starting new quests first. For this, you’ll go to the Elder, who shows you a quest map with the various dungeons. Before starting your adventure, you assemble a party of up to three characters. Each character has its own strengths, for example, a dwarf will be able to spot secret traps that will harm you if you step onto them. During your journey, you’ll encounter goblins and other minions of the evil sorcerer, which you’ll have to defeat. The turn-based combat system is very easy; each character has one movement action, one attack action, and one skill action per turn. The same goes for your opponents. After killing your enemies, they might drop loot like coins, which you’ll need in the village. When you’re in a dungeon, you’ll also be able to look at a map of that said dungeon, which comes in quite handy. These don’t show secret parts, so you should still be on the lookout for those! Finishing a dungeon usually doesn’t last very long and isn’t that hard either.
If you’re going about the dungeons with your party, you’ll soon figure out two demerits. The first one is that you control the entire team, but you can’t split up. You have to move every character one by one to the next room. This seems like a complete waste of time since your characters can’t split up so why can’t you just move them to the next room all at once? The second one is that sometimes a character is standing in the way of for example some coins, and you can’t pick it up because you can’t rotate your camera. You can, however, move your character, but this does still feel like a bug. Picking something up shouldn’t be this much of a ‘challenge’.
Now, for the village. The alchemist will sell you potions, like health potions you can use when you’re in the tunnels. You’ll need the coins you find in dungeons to buy these. The magician will teach you new spells. To learn or upgrade an ability or skill, you need to spend one magic pot. These blue vases can be retrieved in the dungeons as well. You can also recruit new heroes. A new hero becomes available after a certain amount of quests is completed. Then, if you have enough gold, the hero will join you. If your hero dies during combat, you can resurrect them, but this will cost you 20% of your gold! This is a nice idea since putting a fixed price on this resurrection would’ve probably caused some trouble.
For the creative people reading this, the game also offers a map editor. You can share your creations with other players in Steamworks!
Conclusion
Overall, we highly recommend Dark Quest 2 for all you turn-based combat fans. The game is simple, yet keeps you engaged and manages to stay addictive. Because of the short dungeon quests, you can just do quick gameplay (although you’ll probably end up doing multiple runs). The fitting soundtrack and graphics make for very enjoyable gameplay. If the developers keep working on the little downsides in this game, this game can only get better!
Dark Quest 2 - Review,
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