Talk about a pivot. Dark Quest and Dark Quest 2 felt like classic old-school board games come to life. If you played the Hero Quest board game and Dark Quest in quick succession, you’d be forgiven for thinking the latter was a port or tie-in. But Dark Quest 3 has scrapped so much of Dark Quest and 2. As a reference point, Hero Quest has been tossed out and replaced with Hand of Fate, with a pinch of Slay the Spire. This is as close to a hard reset as a game series gets.
Where the original Dark Quests would give you a fellowship and encourage you to level up and equip them over increasingly difficult dungeons, Dark Quest lets you form an affinity with your characters and then kills them, over and over again. You’re going to spend thirty minutes with your four heroes before they die a hideous death. ‘Dark’ Quest indeed.
That’s because Dark Quest 3 is very much the roguelike. It’s a pivot from the more traditional RPG of the first two games, but it’s certainly a fashionable pivot. We aren’t starved of roguelikes on the Xbox.
Each run of Dark Quest 3 has you picking four heroes, before choosing a couple of health boosts and upgrades. Then you’re unceremoniously pushed through the door and into the roguelike. You won’t be back.
Much like Hand of Fate, your quest or journey is represented by a deck of cards with one card revealed from it at a time. Your team resolves these cards, and they’re as likely to be positive as they are negative. Events challenge your characters to make a skill roll against one of your stats (there is a healthy dose of D&D in the character sheets of your barbarians and wizards); a low roll will likely punish your team, while a high roll might hand you an item or upgrade. With the card resolved, you move onto the next and the next, until the region is done and you can move onwards.
Often, these cards are combat, and it’s here where Dark Quest 3 reverts to type. An isometric arena pops into existence with your characters plonked down on it, while enemies are positioned on the edges. Your attacks and abilities are represented as a hand of cards, and you choose from them to perform your one action per turn. A basic attack can be used infinitely, while more powerful cards are used once before disappearing till the next battle. Flame Wizards carpet the arena in AoE damage, Barbarians hit single targets for massive damage, while Shamans summon bears and turn into trees. Like you do.
Combat might seem complicated and fiddly at first. Dark Quest 3 isn’t particularly interested in tutorialising itself, the cards take a while to learn, and the isometric view means that creating a path for you to move is awkward. Do I press up or left to go this way? We’d forgotten how counter-intuitive isometric controls can be.
As time goes on, things become more familiar, but frustrations stack on top of each other. There’s no clear turn order, which blows our mind. It’s so standard in turn-based strategy games that we can’t imagine creating one without it. Not only do you not know who is attacking next, but the order is utterly random. An archer is just as likely to go first as they are last. It strips away so much strategy that we’d taken for granted: who do you attack, if the next attacker could be anyone?
Movement is something else that Dark Quest 3 completely flips on its head. You’re probably expecting to move a certain number of squares per turn, perhaps attacking the back of a unit for massive damage. But no. There’s no limit to how far you can move in your turn. If there’s a ranger stuck in the farthest corner of the map, any unit can run up and stick a knife in their gut.
We’re still wrapping our head around it. What’s the point in an isometric grid if you can move anywhere and attack anything? Wouldn’t it have been simpler and better to have a Darkest Dungeon style presentation, with one team on one side and the other on the other? The grid becomes irrelevant. Any enemy can attack you, and you can attack any enemy.
The grid only becomes a factor when it gets in your way. You can’t move through your own characters, but you equally can’t choose where your characters start. Often, that means that heroes can’t attack anything at all, as the other characters block their path. It’s worse when enemies get the first turn: because you didn’t choose where to start, a Minotaur or other sodding great enemy will move next to your team and unleash an attack that hits all of you. Sometimes the Minotaur will have a double-attack, hitting your team twice. When your health pool is persistent, your team can be wiped out before you even made a single move.
Again, you get used to these quirks. But then you reach the third of combat’s frustrating stages. Playing the same combat scenario for the twentieth time gets repetitive, and there’s no way to automate any of it. You are playing long-winded, slow and protracted battles repeatedly, and Dark Quest 3 shrugs and says it’s part of the game. But we became resentful of that combat deja vu.
The turn-based combat is not Dark Quest 3’s strong point, which is remarkable mostly because Dark Quest has spent three games refining it. We reached a point when turning a card over and revealing combat – particularly ambush combat where there’s no reward for surviving – pushed out a long, sad sigh.
We’re being harsh on Dark Quest 3 because the other cards, and much of the rest of the game, can be pretty damn satisfying. It’s a Jeckyl and Hyde game, with combat being the Hyde.
Climbing the progression ladder, both in the short term and long term, feels so naggingly addictive. In the short term, it’s a race of upgrading your characters swiftly enough that you outlevel your enemies. That might mean spending upgrade points on new cards for your deck, upgrading those cards or improving the baseline stats of the characters. Each character is not only wildly different from the others, but they have a few different specialities that you can double-down on. We would pick a wizard so it could wipe the board with an electricity attack in the early game, before relying on the Shaman to create beasts to soak up damage in the late game. But there are hundreds of other options in the playbook, and it’s here where Dark Quest 3 sings.
The long-term progression is just as addictive, but slightly less generous in how much it gives out. You collect gems very rarely as you play, and these gems can unlock permanent benefits in each region. They range from more rerolls in a given area, all the way to a completely new character for your next playthrough. But the point is that these are persistent upgrades that you will benefit from on every run. Suddenly, you have a better chance of getting further.
Generally, each run will snag you on or two of these permanent boosts, and it’s just enough to make you wonder what the next playthrough might be like. Will I finally get past the Labyrinth region with that upgrade? It’s a thought that will nibble away at you after each game.
Still, Dark Quest 3 could have done with being a tad more generous. When you complete a forty-five minute run and all you’ve got to show for it is an extra health potion in one specific region, it can feel as skimpy as a Barbarian’s loincloth. Remember that you are trudging through some patience-sapping combat, often exactly the same on each run. It means that the question of whether another run is worth it becomes more complicated.
Dark Quest 3 shouldn’t work. It’s built on the shoddiest foundations possible, with turn-based combat that breaks all the rules, but not in a good way. It’s a strategy game that has had a tactical lobotomy, removing anything that resembles planning, synergy or cleverness. The blood-red cherry on the top is that it’s repetitive.
So, why do we keep coming back to play Dark Quest 3? Blame a fantastic upgrade system, and the temptation of playing one more time. We would hate-play the combat, just so that we could snag a better spell or new character as a reward. We can’t recall a game that would anger us as much as it addicted us, so congratulations Dark Quest 3. It’s a questionable award, but it’s yours.
