SteamWorld Quest Review
At some point when I was very young, I was tricked by a multinational advertising team into playing the Pokemon card game. Admittedly, I was not a hard sell because I thought Pokemon was the coolest thing out there, so of course I would want another way to play Pokemon with my friends. Thanks to parents willing to spend their hand-earned money on cardboard with cartoons drawn on them, I immersed myself in the world of card games. Starting with Pokemon, I moved through the Dragon Ball Z card game and Legend of the Five Rings, and settled on Magic: The Gathering. Eventually I burned out on the trading card game world due to the high cost, but it left a mark on my soul that affects me to this day. Fortunately for me, many video game developers are afflicted with the same lasting hunger for cards games and incorporate card game systems into their video games as a way of sating that hunger. SteamWorld Quest: The Hand of Gilgamech is the latest in this legacy, mixing RPG classics with card game combat, all set in a world of machines.
In SteamWorld Quest, players control a group of robotic medieval heroes as they venture across the land to prove themselves worthy. On their quest, they must confront a group of evil cultists who have been burning houses, kidnapping locals, and all those other classic medieval bad guy shenanigans. In their quest to vanquish the evil, players construct decks from a wide selection of cards that enable the heroes to fight and cast spells in classic turn-based combat.
The best and most obvious feature of SteamWorld Quest is the cards. Each of the heroes the player recruits begins with four to six unique cards, with access to multiple copies of most cards. The cards have a wide variety of effects but all fit within the constraints of that specific hero’s abilities. This allows for each character to be built a number of different ways depending on how the player wants them to operate. However, not all of a character’s cards can be brought into battle. Each character deck must have only 8 cards, meaning players have to be very choosy. There are also three different kinds of cards: Strikes, Upgrades, and Skills. Strikes are for hitting the opponents, Upgrades provide boosts to your heroes, and Skills can do anything under the sun. There’s a twist though: In order to use Skills, players must have “steam power.” Steam power is gained by using Strikes and Upgrades, which creates an ebb and flow in combat, alternating between small attacks to build steam and then using that steam for big flashy moves. Besides affecting the flow of combat, it also places restrictions on deck construction. A character won’t get far if they have a deck full of Skills but no steam power to fuel them. I like this system because it gets around the problem a lot of card games have, where resource cards are needed to power other cards, such as Land cards in Magic the Gathering, but resource cards don’t do anything else and aren’t interesting or fun to play.
Accompanying the fun combat and enjoyable deck building is some quality writing. The dialogue between characters isn’t exactly groundbreaking but still does an good job of characterizing the heroes and villains of the story, as well as build the world the characters live in. My favorite is the main character Armilly. Since she was a child, Armilly has always wanted to be a member of the Guild of Heroes. To fulfill her dream, she has lived her life by the rules of their guidebook, which leads her to behaving as a hyperbolic parody of classic fantasy heroes. No matter the location or task, Armilly is bombastic, relentlessly optimistic, and constantly narrates everything that her and her party is doing. Having her around is frankly delightful. Unfortunately, though the writing for the other characters is good, no one else feels as fleshed-out as Armilly, making the party feel a lot like Armilly and some friends, instead of a band of unique individuals working together.
Setting all of these other points aside, how does one actually play SteamWorld Quest? The answer: just like 1000 other turn-based RPGs that have come before it. After putting so much time and energy into making an excellent card system, I guess it’s understandable that actually playing with those cards might be a bit underwhelming. Combat is done in turns, starting with the player. As combat opens, players play up to three cards, with a bonus fourth play if the previous three were all from the same character. Then the enemy plays cards. After that, the cards are revealed and do whatever effect they do, and then it’s a new turn. There’s nothing wrong with this slow-paced turn-based combat, but it’s been around since the late 80s so it’s nothing to get excited about. Beyond the deliberate combat, SteamWorld Quest follows a lot of other classic RPG tropes. As they adventure, the characters level up and their stats get higher. New allies will be encountered and join the party, but only three heroes can be used in battle so players have to decide which characters they like and which characters will never see play ever again. Players purchase new weapons and armor to increase some stats by a marginal amount. You stop at save points. None of these are bad things, but they’re old hat by now to gamers.
There’s nothing wrong with SteamWorld Quest, but there’s also nothing truly outstanding about it either. It’s pretty good, but it’s a pretty good version of something familiar. If the average video game is potato chips, SteamWorld Quest are those nice kettle-cooked potato chips. Satisfying crunch, good flavor, but at the end of the day it is still just fried potato slices with flavor dust on them. If you buy SteamWorld Quest, I bet you’ll have a good time, but for $25, I bet you could get something better.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
