Quest for Infamy
Infamous Quests
If you remember games like Quest
for Glory with some relish, and if you don’t mind a bit of puerile
humour and a buxom wench or two, a degree of perseverance might just pay
off for you.
This is a questing rpg, old
school style, and if you read gremlin’s first look, it will come as no
surprise if I say it takes some settling into. Messy controls, little
clear direction, and a great big map with a necessary pixel hidden
somewhere produce a frustrating start. When combined with average voice
acting, a somewhat annoying musical accompaniment, and a smallish game
window where looking for the screen exits often results in you ending up
outside the gaming window, and I get why
gremlin didn’t persist.
I did though, and if you do, you
may well find it isn’t at all bad. That is if the drinking mini-game
doesn’t tip you over the edge.
The makers clearly have a
fondness for this type of game, and it does show. The good bits are
indeed good, it just struggles under the weight of some not so good
bits. I reckon there is a really good game in here, suggesting the next
Infamous outing might be very good indeed.
Even some of those initial
frustrations abated after a while. Once I worked out that I could
substitute keys to choose my action icons (walk, run, sneak, look, talk
etc) rather than having to constantly click the menu bar I was more
comfortable, and even more so with the music turned off. More tweaks got
rid of the subtitles, and my excursions outside the gaming window got
less and less as I approached the edges with far less vigour. Getting a
map helped too, as there was no longer the necessity to wander through
screen after screen.
I eventually ended up at the end
of the prologue, having been set on the path of the brigand, and it now
felt like I had some purpose. I could have been a sorcerer or a rogue,
and am not sure how, but I will go back and attempt to play as those
characters also. How different the experience will be I don’t know, but
being able to play as different types of characters adds to a game’s
longevity in my view.
For brigand, read fighter, which
is my preferred way of approaching an rpg. It allows me to bring my
first person shooter preferences to the fore, and indulge in a bit of
mindless biffo.
It seemed fairly open, in terms
both of what I did and how I did it, and it started to draw me into the
rich tapestry of its world, through the many conversations and tasks
that there were to be had. Like all such games, you can’t explore too
much, and a garrulous nature will be well rewarded. Unlike many such
games, at least nowadays, there is no journal or log to help you keep
track of things, but I never had too many on the go at any one time so
it wasn’t a big deal.
I did however find that at times
there was a total lack of direction. It might have been me, and a
failure to have a particular conversation, but if I don’t know I should
go to the pub after dark then I just end up aimlessly wandering around
from morning to night looking for goodness knows what goodness knows
where in order to try and get things to move along. And if I then fail
to go to the pub and miss the new character imbibing the libations, what
then?
You do everything with the
mouse, unless you use the keyboard shortcuts, and it’s a detailed albeit
pixelly world. Conversations result in a body shot of the participants,
which is where the buxomness comes in, and it’s a third person
perspective with the fight scenes viewed from side on. Save at will,
although there do appear to be auto saves, and saving is advised as you
can die.
As a brigand I like to fight,
and there was a fair bit of this, but either I was way too brigandish or
the fights themselves were less than they could have been. It’s all turn
based, and you click an icon to indicate your next move (eg slash, stab,
block) but it seemed far too random and way too easy, especially when I
could afford multiple health potions.
On reflection, this all sounds
like a lot of negativity, which is probably a bit unfair. As I said,
there are things in here to like, and the sum of the parts is a lot
better than the parts themselves. I ended up feeling that I quite liked
Quest for Infamy, despite all those parts, and I probably will play it
again. Which in the end is not a bad outcome at all.
Grade: C+
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
Video card: AMD Radeon HD 7800 2048MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
July 2014
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