Tuesday 16 September 2014

Evil Quest

Evil Quest is one of those games that sits in the Steam store that costs barely anything but no one will ever really play or know about.  Quite frankly it's not very good, but I want to be nice to it because while a little crappy there seems to have been some genuine effort put into it by what must be a very small number of people.

Evil Quest follows the adventures of a bloke called Galvis.  Galvis hears the stories of the Chaos Axe, a weapon so powerful that it was hidden away in the land of humans by God himself and now he wants to take it for himself to destroy the world.  He must travel across the lands breaking the 4 seals that keep the Axe of out his reach and then venture to the Astral Plane to slay God and bring an end to humanity.

Before even starting the game I had a problem because I can't think of any game off the top of my head where you play the bad guy that doesn't suck complete shit.  Maybe Dungeon Keeper but I've not played that in such a long time I can't remember if you're really the bad guy in that one, feel free to remind me or tell me of a title if such a thing exists.

Despite its stupid story, Evil Quest actually plays OK.  It's a little basic and a little clunky but it works and the hacking and slashing of enemies is pretty fun.  The game falls short in a lot of areas such as getting items that you use only once and then never again or 2 of the 4 stats being COMPLETELY fucking useless but these don't ruin it enough to make me want to shut it off.  Despite the flaws in it's design I managed to get to the end since they did a good job of pacing the game and not making it drag out too long.

My big problem with Evil Quest comes with the characters, dialogue and artwork.  The art for the games few brief cut scenes looks like something from some adolescents Deviantart page where he keeps all his Sonic fan art, it just had that kind of vibe to it for me.  The designs of the enemies aren't all that bad but there's a lot of palette swapping going on and that's just lazy and bullshit.  The characters are pretty terrible with Galvis being the worst because he doesn't really have a reason for doing anything.  He's a dick to absolutely everybody just because he can be and it makes the whole thing feel very shallow.  Finally the dialogue is extremely cringe worthy with lines written as if a very angsty 15 year old boy had been allowed head writer position on the development team.

But that last line sums up all of Evil Quests problems really.  It plays and feels as if a 15 year old boy who gets bullied a little bit at school and listens to too much Slipknot was given a copy of game maker and told to create something.  The boy isn't an idiot, so he makes something mildly fun to pass the time but by God is it one of the most cringe worthy things in all of gaming.

Despite my harsh words I can sort of recommend Evil Quest since it costs basically no money and it wouldn't take enough of your time to be offensive.  Hell, when everyone shut up and just let me run around the map killing monsters and collecting treasure, I had a good time.  So if you're on some kind of extreme budget and you want something new to play, give Evil Quest ago.  There's enough love and talent on display here to give your support to and hopefully in the future Chaosoft Games will better themselves and produce something really epic in due time.

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