You play as your choice of a brother and sister going out for trick-or-treating on Halloween night. Whichever character you don't choose will dress up for Halloween as a giant piece of candy corn, which (besides being widely mocked) will wind up with them being abducted by the "grubbins," creatures that are ransacking the town for all its candy unbeknownst to every adult. The candy corn outfit makes the child appear to be simply an especially large and enticing piece of candy, and the rest of the game is spent tracking down your sibling to rescue him from being devoured by demons from some otherwordly plane.
To do this, you team up with two other neighborhood kids and collect materials to make different Halloween costumes, each of which has its own special abilities to take down the grubbins. These costumes transform from cute child outfits in the overworld into giant menacing suits of destruction in combat, which is always a hilarious transition to see for each new costume you collect. From robots and ninjas to unicorns and cats, they all have serious combat abilities that aren't necessarily clear in their original forms.
The combat is very simple to understand, but because of that, it also gets repetitive very quickly. Special attacks are charged over two or three battle turns, so most battles are simple attacks every turn until you can use your charged-up special abilities. Therefore all the strategy actually comes before the battle, in choosing the costumes your character and his or her allies should wear, and which "battle stamps" they should each carry. Battle stamps keep an extra special ability of some sort and each character may use one, which sometimes have huge benefits in terms of attack strength or HP. Like many other RPGs, combat eventually becomes quite tedious, though by the end there is a bit more strategy and thought that goes into certain boss battles than you'll see at the beginning.
A handful of minigames also spice up the gameplay, and there are also card collectibles the player may care to look through, but this game is really all about the art and the writing, not the gameplay. Your characters and all of their lines are extremely endearing and funny, and there are some laugh-out-loud lines that may have gamers recalling good lines from previous brilliant Tim Schafer projects like Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. The game's also a treat to look at for the quick development time and low price, utilizing a cartoon style in a brilliant way in 3D, contrasting against the style of costumed characters in battle which carry some badassedness with them. That's the draw of the game, and it's paced out well so as not to keep gamers lingering too long between the rewarding dialogue scenes with tedious battle.
Costume Quest is guaranteed to entertain, and you'll find the story and characters a great reward for progression through the otherwise drab and shallow RPG gameplay. A sure buy for next Halloween season, but I'm personally glad I didn't wait anywhere near that long.
Nathaniel Edwards is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of video games. He serves as gaming writer for http://www.kidzworld.com and contributes articles and reviews for BlogCritics Magazine. For more commentary and other projects, check the author's website at http://www.nathanieledwards.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment