The Unexpected Quest - PC Review

The Unexpected Quest by developer Rionix and publisher PQube Limited—PC (Steam) review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Over the summer I had the chance to sit down to Rionix and PQube's The Unexpected Quest while it was being showcased during the Steam Summer Festival. Having been fully released, this interesting puzzle based Real Time Strategy will keep you busy for a good couple hours.

As unexpectedly as the quest that I was on, this might actually be the shortest review I've ever written. Just about everything that needed to be said was said over the summer when I had the chance to sit down to stages one, two and four as the demo skipped over three.

Starting with two townsfolk, it's up to you to start gathering resources in order to take down barricades and build up the buildings that you're going to need in order to push further. Barracks, Wizard Towers and Forges each need to be built per stage in order to overcome the challenges whether they be through might or mental prowess. To be fair, most of it is taken care of through might because your town's folk have to chop down trees and use their pickaxes against stone blocks before the fighting even begins.

Through the barracks you can recruit warriors, archers and wizards which can each only take on targets of those specifications. This is really why The Unexpected Quest is a "puzzle" based real-time strategy. Enemies of each of those types will be roaming around each map and it's up to you to make sure you're ready to encounter them to move on past. Each enemy type has a level and if your unit is of a lower level, they'll quite easily die unless you use potions and shields on them. To even the score, you'll need to find items that boost each unit type as well as spend gold to increase their respective unit type's level through the forge.

And that's really it. Rinse. Repeat. Sadly eight stages and five hours later you're done. The only thing that could possibly prolong the experience are stars that can be acquired on each level for an achievement. This basically means not losing any units, finding all the treasures and doing all the side quests. After that the adventure is simply over.

Now to play devil's advocate, while I did enjoy my time with the unexpected quest, and while I would have liked more, even with the deadpan ending, it answered about the time that it should. The main reason for this is that every single stage starts off with you having to build from scratch. You can't carry resources over, you can't carry buildings over, and you can't carry units over. All of this has to be done each and every single time making it quite long after a while especially when you had a good rhythm going. The only thing that actually carries over are items in your inventory such as being able to start your units off at a higher level, potions for healing, and items to boost resource production.

Summary

So on the note that it ends, I believe we can expect more unexpected quests in the future. In order to progress though, the series will need a few modifications to be done to the style in order to make it more interesting as the current formula gets a little stale after a few hours as the only thing changing was the stage layouts and puzzle aspects of what had to be done before what.

Otherwise if you've been looking for something in the real time strategy vein that's been very slim pickings of late and are up for a little bit of puzzle solving, The Unexpected Quest may just be worth checking out.

Score: 7.5 / 10

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The Unexpected Quest - PC Preview

The Unexpected Quest by developer Rionix and publisher PQube Limited—PC (Steam) preview written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

As part of the Steam Summer Festival, Rionix and PQube released a demo for an intriguing Puzzle based Real Time Strategy called The Unexpected Quest. With your ship having capsized in a storm, some of those that survived set out in order to light beacons for the other survivors but like any journey, it’s not without its trials and obstacles along the way and those that nature has provided will be the least of your worries.

Real Time Strategies like the Command & Conquer, StarCraft or the Age of Empires series were very prominent back in the day but we haven’t seen much in the style in the recent years. We’ve seen hybrids such as the SpellForce series that has recently made a return and it’s these entries that show that you don’t just need to focus on resource gathering and troop building, there can be more to it than that, and that’s where The Unexpected Quest comes in. A bit in its title, I had not expected to find such an interesting blend of puzzle elements in a Real Time Strategy as you need to collect resources and remove obstacles in order to face off against the enemies that are heading your way.

Probably one of the most prominent features is that you get to see almost everything upfront. You don’t need to massively scroll around a large map uncovering a fog of war, instead, everything is just about in front of you allowing you from the start to set out how you’re going to approach a situation. Currently there are only three stages available however while the first gets your feet dry as you just came out of the ocean, the second gets them wet again as you head into battle against zombies that are currently trying to eat the townspeople that you’ve come across and the third introduces one of the larger maps after you’ve run away from the zombies.

What I found interesting, and maybe this makes it an RTS-lite, is that you don’t need to select your workers to tell them to do something. Instead, you simply need to click on what needs to be picked up or built and they’ll do it. The same can be said for your enemies. If you need them to be taken out, you simply click on them and then one of your soldiers will charge forward in order to do battle. You can queue up actions for each of these units which helps as a worker can only bring one bag of gold or one unit of food at a time. Building structures is the same thing, only one worker can be working on this so just make sure that if there’s a lot to pick up that you’ve taken care of before building to make things go faster. Just make sure to not queue actions up around an enemy as your worker will run away screaming.

For combat, while the same approach does apply as mentioned above where you simply need to click on an enemy, your unit types themselves can only do battle against specific foes. Warriors will face off against warriors and beasts of the same caliber. Archers will go up against archers or flying units. Finally Wizards will go up against foes of the arcane. Also like your workers, you can’t send in two or three warriors against one zombie or giant spider. Instead, everything is one-on-one so if there are three separate enemies to be taken out, you have to send three separate units simultaneously and make sure you have some healing on hand as they may need it.

Thankfully, you can stack the odds in your favour by leveling up your troops’ weapons at the armory or keeping items that boost their levels on hand. What I really found neat was that these boost items don’t stack so a gauntlet that raises both your Warriors and your Archers will render the sword and the bow that you have useless. This is great in that you have a limited on hand inventory, but in the worst case, items can always be put into a chest for later usage and can be carried over to the other stages.

So while there are currently only three available stages, The Unexpected Quest is something that I would love to see more of once it’s finished. Currently it feels rather polished but it’ll be interesting to see where things go from the currently six showcased stages on the main interface.

Score: N/A

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