Quick Look: SpeedQUEST for iPhone
When I was growing up I used to love role playing games, especially when you had to spend a lot of time building up your characters and solving quests. Nowadays I don’t have the time for such epics any more, but I still like the idea of fighting monsters, collecting treasures, and saving hapless people. It seems that at least one developer has tried to accommodate me in the form of SpeedQUEST, or as I like to call it “speed dating for the RPG crowd”.
Another Randomly Generated Level
The game is quite simple, really. You start out picking either the hero or heroine, and then choose which skill level you want to play: Training, Normal Difficult or Insane. Then you’re thrown into a level and it’s time to explore and fight. The screen is comprised of two sections. The upper section has your stats (heath, mana, gold, etc.) and the buttons that let you switch attack methods. The lower section is divided into 16 squares and holds all the goodies to be found and monsters to be conquered. You only get to spend a certain amount of time on each level, and then you have to move on to the next whether you were done or not. The game ends when you die, but otherwise I’m not sure there’s a true end since each level is randomly generated (and I’ve never made it that far).
Your three methods of attack or sword, bow and magic. Flying creatures are only susceptible to bows and magic, while the sword will slice through a ground creature quicker than a bow will take it out. Bows and magic work against any kind of creature, however. To kill a creature you make sure the appropriate weapon is selected and just click on the creature until it is dead. To search a treasure chest or the ground (you’ll learn which ground tiles can be searched in tutorial mode) you click on it, and if you find something you click again to take it. There are also doors that you click once to open, and click a second time to rescue the damsel in distress (interestingly enough, no men ever managed to get trapped in these cells).
There’s not a lot of depth to the game, but it sure provides a rush as the levels get more populated and you have less time to search them. It basically boils down to your priorities: is it more important to rescue a captive or get a health potion? Would you rather slay all the monsters or take a couple of hits so you can gather some gold? You have to keep in mind that the game is real time, so those 6 monsters aren’t going to wait for you to empty the 2 chests of gold before they attack. While there’s not a whole lot of complexity, it does require a bit of strategy to be a star SpeedQUEST adventurer.
The graphics look pretty decent. All the monsters are well rendered, though there really isn’t any animation to speak of. If anything I’d suggest that the colors maybe not be quite so drab in both the characters and a lot of the scenery. The sound effects are actually quite rich for such a simple game, though they sometimes don’t match the action, like the sound that accompanies opening a treasure chest. It just doesn’t seem quite right to me. There is no music, which as always is a shame.
If you’re looking for something with involving quests and detailed character development, keep on looking. However, if you’d like to have the equivalent of the Reader’s Digest condensed version of an RPG to pull up and play for a few minutes from time to time, SpeedQUEST should fit the bill quite nicely. You can feel like you’ve achieved something in a short amount of time, and have no qualms about starting over again the next time you launch the game.
Final Verdict: Recommended
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Tags: Eric Pankoke, iPhone, Quick Look, review, RPG, SpeedQUEST, technobrains
