The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot Review

Ubisoft’s free-to-play dungeon crawler, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, takes an interesting approach to the genre as it furthers regular hack and slash gameplay with tower defence elements.  This game features a player developed world, where a hero is used to raid castles while defences can be researched and advanced.  The developers shed some humour on the genre through the promotion of a cartoony art style and a playful attitude.

The game currently features three playable heroes: a rambunctious knight, a sly archer and an exclusively available mage. The chosen hero moves to a kingdom in the sky called Opulencia, where the looting of other’s castles is highly encouraged.  Following traditional dungeon crawler gameplay, heroes kill minions to collect items and gain experience.  When a level is gained, a skill is unlocked and can be equipped to one of the four slots.  Although these skills correspond to a level, they do scale, allowing the player to equip abilities according to preference or situation.

The simplistic and repetitive hack and slash gameplay is enhanced by the subtleties of hero and castle customization.  For example, although heroes enter each castle in the same fashion, the selection of room types, and the placement of minions and traps differ.  The two types of gameplay interact with each other as trialing one’s castle and attempting to loot others allows the player to determine what minion composition is most effective or where to place traps.  Successfully completing an opponent’s castle, or defending one’s own, rewards the player with crowns and resources.  Resources are also necessary to make armour and weapons, brew potions, summon creatures and traps, create workers, level your hero, improve storage capacity and purchase buildings and different rooms.  The machinery required to do these activities can also be improved with these resources (including gold, life force and blings) which are predominately acquired through successfully defeating an enemy’s castle.  As all the game modes are reliant on resources, grinding perpetuates the player’s limits.

Most recognizably, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot does a good job of creating a community.  As most of the castles are created by players, they tend to evoke a sense of their personalities, adding a unique quality to the players’ experiences.  When a completing an opponent’s castle, the player can choose to rate it and leave comments.  This rating system allows the community to give advice on how to improve parts of the castle, or to simply show admiration, while inevitably affecting the gameplay.  Furthermore, the developers encourage people to rate castles by providing small experience bonuses as a reward.

Visually, the game is appealing and it remains consistent in style and tone but there are a few bugs, such as being unable to equip a skill that will force the player to restart the game.  The biggest concern I experienced when playing the beta was the imbalance.  Most castles that matched my hero’s level were impossible to beat, forcing me to farm castles of lower levels.  This format feels unfair because it involves looting real people who are lower levelled than you and further setting back their progress.  Currently, the cycle of the game seems to be that players are forced to invest more resources into their castle to defend against these higher level players and as a result, resources are not being spent on weaponry, armour and potions to benefit their hero.  Perhaps, this problem is the result of an overinvestment players attribute to their defences, as it goes against the nature of the game.  Another criticism I have is that a player should not have to return to the castle to level, which actually involves the use of resources.  Although this method encourages resource management, being in a situation where a hero achieves maximum experience but does not have enough resources to level forces them to farm resources inefficiently and it also discourages players from completing a castle when experience is no longer gained.