The first quarter of this year’s releases on the iOS was surprisingly strong. Our GOTY contender list grew fairly quickly, and we actually questioned if we were being too lenient with our standards. Fortunately, the waves of forgettable games came in, and made our GOTY picks stand out even more. Over the last couple of months there hasn’t been much to talk about in the iOS gaming world. Hyped up games failed to live up to expectations, and IAP driven paidmium titles seemed to flood the AppStore every Wednesday night. Thankfully, there have been a few titles that have stood out, and a couple of those are definitely strong Game Of The Year material. The most recent addition to our GOTY list should be no surprise, especially considering the team behind it; Rodeo Game’s Warhammer Quest.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Warhammer Quest, it’s originally a board game set in the Warhammer Universe and is the successor to the HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest games. While Quest was originally released in 1995 and while it was, and still is, very popular with multiple magazines helping to build upon the universe and receiving a number of expansions, Warhammer 40,000 is most likely the game that most fans of the series are familiar with. Since it’s been released and re-released with multiple ‘Edition’s (starting in 1987 with the First Edition, and most recently receiving it’s Sixth Edition in 2012), getting various expansions and even spawned it’s own movie, there’s almost no way to avoid WH40K if you’re into the Warhammer Universe. However, WH: Fantasy Battle, where it all started, is where you should look if you’re most interested in most of the background lore for the games.
Now that we’re done with that little history lesson, Warhammer Quest is set in the ‘Old World’, focusing on a group of adventures who have joined together in order to battle demons and monsters with the hopes of becoming famous, highly respected warriors. Throughout the game, you’ll be given quests and objectives to complete, progressing throughout the story while collecting a massive amount of loot and leveling up your characters with a pretty depthy upgrade system. But at it’s core, it’s a Dungeon Crawler that focuses on loot and rare items, branching out into some great RPG and Adventure gameplay.
If you’re familiar with Rodeo Game’s previous Hunters titles, you should feel right at home with the graphics, animations and UI. The movement has been more streamlined, as you can select movements for your characters before others are finished moving to their selected spots and zooming in/out + maneuvering the camera is a lot tighter, giving you the feeling of having more control over everything. Now aside from the tweaked user interface the first thing that really grabbed my attention when starting Warhammer Quest up was the way that the in-level inventory system is handled. While you’re playing the game in landscape mode, to enter your inventory/equip screen all you need to do is turn your device to portrait mode. Here, you can easily select your characters and change out equipment and items quickly and get back to gameplay in a flash. The whole system is really quite impressive.
As for the gameplay; You’re given a multitude of side-quests that run alongside your ‘main’ quests that progress the story forward. While making your way through the game, you’ll come across various villages, each having their own quests associated with them. These quests are shown on the map in red while white sections are quests that will move you forward and open up more villages and settlements to visit. Each of the dungeons are split up into areas, with each area having a set number of enemies to defeat. The only way to progress through the dungeon is to clear out one area at a time. Once you complete an area, you’ll be able to collect all of the loot you’ve earned.
Some dungeons have multiple paths to explore, giving you more chances to earn some awesome loot and equipment which is a great addition to the game. With the amount of depth in the equipment and spell systems as well as the massive amount of loot available and top notch story-telling; it’s very easy to see that an insane amount of work has gone into making Warhammer Quest a true and faithful adaptation of the board game while streamlining it, taking out all of the tedious card and piece management that slows down the physical version. There’s not one negative thing I can say about WHQ, and Rodeo Games has set a new standard, not only for themselves, but for iOS gaming in general.
With Warhammer Quest being a true ‘console-like’ gameplay experience on the iOS as well as how expensive the Warhammer board games can get, the price tag of $4.99 is incredibly cheap. For those of you who know how pricy the board games can get, you might even feel inclined to purchase a couple of the IAP characters or Gold Packs right off the bat just to show your support to these amazingly talented developers. This is an easy 5 star game; one that each and every iOS gamer should experience, and is also a very strong contender for iOS Game Of The Year. There’s really not much more that I can say about it other than you shouldn’t think twice about picking Warhammer Quest up. Get it. You won’t regret it one little bit.
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