14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft's The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a very interesting game that blends several key aspects of other popular games such as Diablo and Dungeon Keeper and attempts to present them with a thick coating of humor.
The ingenious concept looks enticing on paper, but in practice you're always chasing glory while someone vandalizes your home, and there's not much you can do about it. However, the game is genuinely fun and the best thing is that it opened the gates to the beta test back in February, so everyone can try their hands at swashbuckling freely.
The free-to-play game's good old-fashioned hack-and-slash action is its main draw, and it's weird for Ubisoft to meddle in that equation instead of repairing the castles' many roof leaks.
The latest update to the game introduces pets that will accompany players during their break & enter shenanigans, providing some company and – most importantly – picking up gold and life force.
Although it's true that some people just can't be bothered to click any faster, it certainly is odd to see the developers remove some of the choices they have to make. While it is true that life has horrible gameplay and that video games try to make up for it, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot also introduces the notion of earning rewards for hasty runs, as each castle has a certain time to beat.
That time limit meant that your every move counted while plundering, and that time spent collecting gold along the way meant less time spent ransacking the throne room. That choice is moot now, as collecting gold has become automated, because nobody likes to lose virtual gold that was just defiantly laying there.
Why bother with gold at all, why not just have stuff happen automatically, if it's not going to factor in the gameplay? Additionally, picking up life orbs during more challenging fights introduced a layer of complexity and strategy to the mindless hacking and slashing, which is now gone.
You could shift the tides of war with a carefully deployed stun that allowed you to take a breather during a boss fight and collect a nearby orb, but that isn't an option anymore with the wide array of woodland critters that will be following you around like imprinted ducklings.
Maybe they won't have such a visible effect on combat, but it's still bothersome when stuff gets simplified like this for no good reason, when it used to be a factor in how you played the game. Remember Diablo 3's elective mode? At least some of the pets are annoyingly cute.
