Review- Dark Quest 2

I picked this game up during Steam’s Summer Sale for a few dollars. It’s an old school dungeon crawler, turn based RPG. You have a cast of classic RPG classes (Barbarian, Archer, Cleric, Wizard, Dwarf, Monk) and are on a quest to save a town from an evil sorcerer. You do this by visiting a series of locations, killing monsters, leveling up and buying new gear.

It’s a very simplified version of a game style we’ve seen countless times. But I was going for simple so that is not a knock against it. I had played Divinity: Original Sin 2 for awhile, and while fun, it got a little heavy so I had put it aside for awhile. I wanted some RPG flavor without having to dive back into something that deep.

Your characters operate on a grid and have access to basic attacks and limited use abilities. Some of these abilities are very powerful but can be used once during a dungeon. The trick is deciding when to use them and how to position yourself to not let your weak wizard get pummeled. This makes each room into a puzzle to be solved.

Overall, it’s not a bad game. The leveling mechanic was quite interesting. Instead of experience, you would find magic pots in each dungeon. You would then use those to give a point to any character’s skills. This allows you to level characters without playing them. As some characters worked better than others for different maps this allows you to use your main group to level up the others for when you need them.

However, the game is not without its flaws. Some pretty major. First, it’s an isometric 3D view which has it’s pros and cons. The game leans heavily on the cons. You can’t adjust your camera other than a little scrolling. This results in tiles being covered up by characters and you are unable to select them.

For example, let’s say you wanted to move a character to the tile to the North of the first monster in the image. You can’t select it. This can be game ruining sometimes when you need to attack a particular monster, or select one of your own characters to activate in a particular order.

There are also some game breaking bugs. If you use certain powers against the final boss it breaks the game and you have to quit and start the fight over.

Movement can get a little tedious. The maps have multiple paths which inevitably means having to backtrack if you want to visit every room. And you do, because the level up items can be hidden anywhere. Moving three characters through multiple empty rooms gets tedious on the big maps.

Overall, it was worth the $2 or $3 I paid for it. But I wouldn’t be satisfied if I had paid even the full $8 price.