Dark Quest Reviews

Recommended

It's basically HeroQuest - and at this price, it's hard to knock it.

Not bad. A digital adaptation of the classic Hero Quest board game. Could have been better but still good

Recommended to fans of casual turn-based tactics and dungeon crawlers. Pretty basic and short but fun for what it is and worth it for the price. The second game is a big step up with more content and polish. +Art style +Exploration/adventure +Turn-based tactics battles +Variety of skills, items +Variety of dungeons -Barebones options -Lacking animations -No character choices -No tutorial -No key rebinding -Unlisted controls (E end turn, numbers for abilities) -Awkward switching characters -Lacking music -Empty chests, fake potions -No difficulty options -Very limited healing -Autosave only -Only 3 characters/classes -Single use weapons -Lacking character/enemy info -Balance issues -Lackluster ending -Short, ~2-3 hrs

Dark Quest is a 10 year old mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app plays more like a board game than the old school Hack/Rogue ripoff it's trying to be, with dumbed down and simplistic gameplay intended for iPhone users rather than dedicated gamers. It does at least let you control more than one character, but that tiny bit of differentiation is hardly enough to make this an interesting prospect for PC gamers. From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The mobile app features simple, fairly basic 2D visuals, and while some effort went into them, and they don't look bad exactly, they don't look great, either. In the 3D era of gaming, that kicked off in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D GPUs like the S3 Virge and ATI Rage, phoning in the graphics like this isn't going to win any awards or appeal to enthusiast PC gamers. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone. These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this mobile app is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 15 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality mobile app is to be expected. So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? Dark Quest is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the mobile app, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Dark Quest is a great HeroQuest-Like, though graphically simple, it technically recreates HeroQuest well. Recommended to you if you are a fan of HeroQuest, & pastistic table-top adventure games. The music is exceptional, & created by the same man that created the music for the original HeroQuest video-games.