Review – Lock’s Quest (Frustration Simulator 2008)
Let me preface this review by saying I never played the original Lock’s Quest on the Nintendo DS. In fact, I’ve never even used a DS. I have zero emotional investment in this game and have no desire to see it fail or succeed. I’m completely unbiased and only agreed to review this game because I’m totally into tower defense games (I recently beat Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten on both difficulties and loved every minute of it).
With that out of the way I’m just going to dive into this head first. Lock’s Quest is broken. It’s beyond broken. This game is a hot, steaming pile of broken. Initially I tried to play the game with mouse and keyboard because, well, this is (primarily) a PC gaming website. After about five minutes with the game I actually wanted to die. I pushed on, determined to get through the dialogue that I don’t care about involving characters I’m not invested in, wanting to get to the actual tower defense part of the game that interested me in the first place.
The controls are so completely borked that I never made it more than 30 minutes into the game, and I got the distinct feeling it should have taken half that time. After spending an hour or two with the game I gave up and immediately started messaging Tim (our loving taskmaster of an editor in chief) about how bad the game was. The last time I wrote something on this website was for ROKH, and that game was also pretty broken, although in Early Access and not near as broken as Lock’s Quest. I immediately began to lament at my choice of game to review.
Mercifully I found myself starting a new job shortly after this which, in tandem with my girlfriend’s birthday, prevented me from being able to complete this review in a timely fashion. “I’ll try it again on controller” I told myself. “Surely this garbage port will work better with a controller” I reassured myself. “There’s no way it could be worse than keyboard and mouse” I deceived myself. Oh how wrong I was.
With keyboard and mouse, the game was playable (barely) but extremely frustrating. After selecting a unit to place down on the tiles for my tower defending there was no way to “exit” out of placing more of that unit. I would actually just need to continually place the same structure down until I ran out of resources. Also there’s no pause. The game SAYS there’s a pause button but you can’t pause this game. I don’t know why, or how they can get away with not having the ability to pause the freaking game but they did it. If you can pause this game, I never found out how (I tried hitting escape about a hundred times, at first to pause the game, but eventually to try and escape the torture of this fresh hell I’d found myself in but to no avail).
With controller… well… there were exactly two tasks I was able to do with my controller: skip through dialogue and move the camera. That’s it. I couldn’t move my character, and even if I could who knows what I wouldn’t be able to do next. I was curious if others had run into similar issues so I checked the Steam reviews for it and technically it says “mixed” but even the positive reviews will tell the story of just how buggy, broken, and horrible this game is on the PC platform.
This review has been poorly written, poorly thought out, and poorly structured. Which I think is fitting for a game of this caliber. If you take one thing away from this review it should be this: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. If someone buys this game for you as a gift, you are legally entitled to punch them in the face repeatedly. If someone even mentions this game out loud they should be punished with the wrath of Odin himself. This is the worst port of a game I’ve ever played, and by far the worst game I’ve played in 2017. I wouldn’t touch this game with a ten foot pole without immediately setting fire to the pole.
Summary:
1
Garbage Game
fakeghostpirate
JustinCommentator, Gamer, Sim Racer, Dog Lover, Beard Grower
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