This is my first time playing the Quest For Stoken game, so this review is from a first-hand account of my gameplay experience.
The last game I played was Minetest, 3-4 months ago. Funny thing is, this game reminded me of Minetest a lot, with the bit of a blocky nature of the floor of the game and some other stuff.
I initially recorded this review as a video, but I experienced some problems with the upload, so I’m uploading images instead.
Okay so getting into it…
I like doing stuff on my phone so I first tried to play on my phone, and I met the realization that for some reason, the game doesn’t load on my phone.
I switched to my laptop and it loaded just fine. Directly from the homepage, the game starts loading up without any complex prep or instructions.
The opening page had a very basic layout, with SPACEBAR hovering somewhere in the background. It took me a while to understand that the hand above Spacebar there was signaling me to press the Spacebar to continue. I think it’d be better if there was some text accompanying the Spacebar. Maybe something like the typical "Press SPACEBAR to continue".
Control and keys
It took me only a few minutes to figure out the keys for basic control and movement. The arrow keys are for horizontal movement, Z is for shield, S is for ducking, X for action objects and surprisingly, the Shift key is used for attacking. The shift key for attacking posed a problem I’m calling the Sticky key problem.
For using X to perform actions like lighting a fire, you earn points. I lit this fire below and earned
The sticky key problem
To attack monsters and kill them fast, you’re going to have to make a continuous repetitive attack, which will be meaning repetitively pressing the shift key. Now we all know what repetitively pressing shift does- turns on Sticky keys. So in my attempts to quickly attack and kill, the sticky keys prompt would just pop. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game would pause when pop-up notifications appear, but it doesn’t, so I died many times because of this.
The killer pigeons here killed me real easy thanks to the sticky key problem. I put up a good fight before they took me out though. The pigeons kind of remind me of a similar killer bird problem I had in the Neoxian City's Minetest world. That bird was a duck. Would you believe that? You can check the linked 3Speak Video in the post here for the full game recording.
The Game Aesthetics (Looks and Feels)
The gameplay looked really smooth. There was no lag, and you don’t have to wait for action after pressing a key. The game was completely in sync with the keys. The movement and background music synced effortlessly and there was practically zero lag throughout the gameplay.
The game environment is pretty nice and basic. I love it. You can clearly tell that the player is a guy on a skate with a shield and sword, and you can identify trees on the path as well as clearly see the brick walls. However, in certain skins like the city skin, it was a bit difficult to separate between the background and the game itself. For instance, over here, this waterfall is a pit, but the background makes it a little difficult to tell that it’s a pit. You can see it's a water alright, but it looks like you can walk over it. Maybe that is just a witty part of the game though so I guess it's cool.
Like most games, there’s a health bar to track your health. Beneath the health bar, there are (3) Hive logos that represent your lives. Every time you die, you lose one and you have to start all over once you run out. There’s a scoreboard as well which seems to increase for every monster I kill. There’s also a point board to collect points after killing monsters which is pretty cool.
But what is even cooler is the Qr code stuck in the brick walls which I found leads to the SkateHive community. I think embedding it inside the game was a great design move.
It seems the USB kind-stuff was used to mark checkpoints. I’m not completely sure though because I got to one of them, and after dying, I didn’t respawn there but all the way back at the start. So I don’t really know.
The background music was okay. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it wasn’t bad. Nothing much to say about it really.
I got sucked into the game because even though it looked easy on paper, my max score wasn't looking so good. I ended up playing many rounds, and my score for the round I remembered to take a screenshot of was...
A summary of the improvements that can be made and some recommendations.
Taking it from the start…
It’d be great to have some text accompany the “SPACEBAR” signal. I don’t think only spacebar written in the background with a finger “seeming” to be pointing at it is enough to direct players to actually click the space bar. Not immediately at least, because it’ll take a minute or some seconds to figure out.
I think something needs to be done to make the background properly stand out from the foreground, so we can properly see obstacles like pits.
As for the sticky key problem, the simple fix would be to change the attack key to something else. I suggest the enter key for instance since it has a similar utility in many games. Another option would be to add a key configuration feature to the game so that we can manually configure the keys ourselves. This would honestly be way cooler than the first option.
I assume the USB things I see are actually supposed to represent checkpoints. If that is the case, I don’t think they work right now. Because if they did, I should’ve spawned at the next checkpoint when I died, and not all the way back. So maybe working to make sure the checkpoint thing gets resolved?
Overall, the gameplay was smooth and movements tracked the key action and background music. The gaming experience was amazing for a relatively new game. With a few more tweaks here and there, I see Quest for Stoken getting massive adoption and use both across the Hive community and outside it.
all screeshots aside the minetest screenshot (obviously) are from quest.stoken. minetest screenshot is from minetest