REVIEW: The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot


Title	The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot
Developer	Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher	Ubisoft
Release Date	Open Beta: Feb 26, 2014
Genre	Free-to-Play Tower Defense
Platform	PC
Age Rating	T
Official Website

The Mighty Quest for Epic loot is a free-to-play hack ‘n’ slash game from Ubisoft that takes place in Opulencia. While online games aren’t usually my thing, for many reasons, I thought it might be fun to give one a serious try and see what I thought about it.

The residents of Opulencia all treasure their jewels, precious metals, enchanted furniture and other shiny things of that sort. They fight with each other over every little thing, and no pile of loot is ever big enough. Their quest for epic loot carries on as they try and outdo each other in a “Keeping up with the Joneses” sort of way. You take on the role of one such resident and fight your way to the most epic loot available.

The setup here is pretty easy to grasp. Configure your castle layout, equip your character and set out to attack others. The game is sectioned off based on your level, so you won’t have to scroll through other players who are far too leveled up for you to be fighting. For instance, you will be in Little Spitaly from Level 1-4, and Heated Gardens from 5-9.

To attack other players, just click attack at the top of your screen to open the menu to find someone in your level range. Once you select the castle you are thinking of storming, you will see that player’s stats, life, their defense rating, difficulty of the castle and the win ratio. If you think you can handle it, click to attack and enter the castle. Now you walk around and find all of the monsters and traps. Defeat everything and get to the end.

The game has an active battle system that is very basic and easy to use. Simply left-click your mouse button for a normal attack, or click the right mouse button for a special attack. There will also be other special abilities or attacks available to you, seen on the bottom of your screen, that you can use when needed.

The castles are all laid out exactly how each character wants them to be, so things range from easy to hard. You can see the level of the player you’re attacking before you decide to attack, but you have no way of knowing how well they have things set up until you enter their castle. Basically, you could be looking at 10 monsters scattered through a huge castle or a thousand all piled up in one small area. That’s kind of half the fun of the game!

After you loot each castle, you can check out your new items. Hovering over an item will pull up a box that shows you the stats of that item, as well as the stats of what you have equipped, so you can decide which you would like to use. Equip what you want and sell what you don’t need.

At the end of each section, there will be a boss that needs to be dealt with and, depending on your level and equipped items, these can be a breeze or a bit tricky. Usually there are some nasty monsters protecting the boss castle. Make sure you equip your best stuff before you enter, and you will likely want to be on at least the same level as the boss. There are quite a few experience and gold boosts that can be found throughout the game that might come in handy if you need a quick level before beating a boss or something.

Just as you attack other players, they attack you! You are going to be pretty well screwed and get your ass kicked if you don’t level up the different things in your own castle. To do this, you need Life Force and Gold. Both can be collected by defeating other players, or purchased since the game offers microtransactions. You have quite a bit of creative freedom on how to set everything up, you can add rooms and hallways, monsters and traps.

Once you have your castle set up how you like it, you have to go through it yourself to see it if is beatable. Without doing this, the things you changed in your castle won’t update to your fellow players. I had to go through my own castle about four times with one layout I had and I wasn’t sure if I should be proud of my layout or if I just sucked and couldn’t beat it. I went with proud!

Some of the different things to level up in your castle that I have been talking about are the Castle Heart, which is your castle level, and the Architect’s Office which lets you build on rooms or halls and much more. There is also the Potion Brewery where you obviously make potions, the crafting lab where you make new creatures, and the blacksmith where you craft and reforge. All of this requires Life Force and Gold, but is well worth it.

Visually the game is great to look at. There aren’t really a lot of different areas. You’re pretty much in a castle or looking at a menu, so, given that the layouts are different from each player created castle, it really helps things not get too stale. The castles have quite a bit of detail in them like patterns on the floor, and little flourishes on the brick walls. There are also random things found throughout the castle like book shelves and such. Some of these you can attack and others you cannot. You will know which you can attack because they will have a health meter showing.

The characters all offer a little something different to look at. They might not break the mold on game characters, but they are pleasant to look at while you play. I had a Diamond pack and used The Runaway, so immediately I was pretty happy with a cute girl character to play with.

The music is pretty decent. The battle themes are all geared towards keeping you hyped up to continue on. The traps all make their own noises, and you can always tell when you have alerted a monster. The random things your character says as you are fighting can be pretty entertaining, as well. If you are dying, which you will know by hearing this eerie heartbeat, they will complain and suggest you use the healing button. As if you wouldn’t have figured that out on your own!

LAG. That one term that instantly angers most gamers. Yea, there is quite a bit of that to deal with here. I’ve played the game at all different times of the day and night and, sometimes, it is simply unplayable. I’ll admit to having very little patience when I am dying because, by the time it shows me that my character is very low on health, it’s too damn late. I tend to think that maybe it’s not simply a patience issue, but that the game has some issues. Attacking can be a bit tricky, as well, since it takes so long to register that you have clicked anything that the monster you wanted to attack has usually walked to a different spot. I did try the game quite a few times, and I even thought maybe they had fixed this issue since I was able to play for about an hour with little-to-no lag not too long ago, but when I went to play again recently… well, it was unplayable. Even a decent game does me no good when I can’t play when I want, and it makes it a bit hard to really get into the game.

The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot is full of charmingly crazy and creative characters, and offers great customization of your castle. It’s not perfect, but, when the lag is bearable, it will kill some time, though it can get a bit repetitive. It feels like it needs a little something to break up the monotonous times, but there are online activities that you can take advantage of that might help. While the game is fun to play, it’s never going to be something I have a huge addiction to and that I don’t want to walk away from. Good thing, too, since the lag makes that impossible.