Boomzap Entertainment has long been known for games played by housewives half a world away. Its hidden-object puzzle adventures (HOPA), while lovingly drawn, have never been very inspiring. So it was exciting to learn that Boomzap was finally leaving HOPA games behind and venturing into the realm of freemium fun with the game formerly titled The Quest, and now published as Super Awesome Quest.
Super Awesome Quest is a tile-flipping adventure game, where Greg the paladin and his friends fight evil in their quest towards glory and riches. The combat in the game takes place on a tiled board, where every tile flipped over reveals two more adjacent to it. Tiles allow you to attack, shield yourself, buff yourself, and even pick up extra loot. It’s as super fun as the game’s name promises.
Story progression takes place on a map similar to the ones you see in Candy Crush Saga and its clones. As Greg (and later, along with his companions) you must fight your way across different tilesets, battling baddies who get progressively tougher. You gain levels as you battle, as well as crafting materials with which to upgrade your gear. However, Super Awesome Quest starts to falter exactly at this point.
Boomzap has done an amazing job with the graphics, music, and overall polish of Super Awesome Quest. But while battles are innovative and a nice refresher from the card-based combat we’ve been inundated with, they’re just too tough. Super Awesome Quest’s biggest failing is what it is entirely based on: its combat system.
The game’s design instinctively makes you think that all you have to do is fight your way once through each stage, get to the end, and make it to the next tileset. This is not the case. A player going by this logic (as the map would suggest) will get stuck as early as stage six or seven. You’ll find that your gear simply won’t cut it, yet you don’t have enough materials to upgrade it. Like any good RPG player, you will instinctively go back to earlier stages to grind, where you’ll realize that this is what you’re meant to do all along.
Except grinding soon becomes impossible, because once you have replayed a level ten times, enemies get impossibly difficult. This is the case even in the first battle. It results in the player being caught between really tough early levels that have risen in difficulty, and later levels unplayable because of a lack of gear. And of course, you can’t get any loot or experience points since you cannot win any battles. This wasn’t just my experience either; several others who tried the game shared these sentiments. Super Awesome Quest is awesome until it gets impossible to play.
If the game is unplayable because I am doing something wrong, it gives no indication as to what that mistake is. Hopefully a patch to fix this gets released soon, or at least, by the time the game launches globally. With the great development teams at Boomzap Entertainment’s disposal, it would be a pity to see all that talent wasted on an imbalanced game.
You can try Super Awesome Quest out for iOS and Android if you’re in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines. The game has yet to see a global launch.
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