What happens when you cross a Snake game with some powerful heroes? Well, you get Nimble Quest, an RPG game that’s neither original in concept nor in name. If you’ve previously played Snake you’ll know what I’m talking about. Snake requires you to move a small dot across the board, pick up more dots to grow longer, and eventually meet its end by clashing against its tail or other objects. You do pretty much the same thing in Nimble Quest with the exception that heroes replace the little dots. Snake was a quite popular game in its time. Will Nimble Quest with its slight variation find enough support from fans? Let’s find out.
Marching Heroes And Explosive Action
Nimble Quest starts off with you playing a hero marching across a forest (read narrow green board) in search of gems and heroes. On your journey you encounter poisonous spiders, vicious knights, and other daring opponents who aim to kill. You must defeat the villains and collect enough gems to move to the next level. Defeated enemies often drop gems and heroes and you pick them up as you continue to move along the board. Each hero holds unique powers, some have sword fighting abilities, others are fire throwers and some ace archers. As you march on, these heroes will follow you around and use their powers to defeat surrounding enemies.
Once you move past the forest level, you enter the Graveyard. Here you encounter a different set of villains such as the undead, zombies, vampire bats, and gravestones. Future levels include a Sewer, a Courtyard and a Castle and at each level you do pretty much the same thing. March along, defeat enemies, pick up gems and move on. Sounds pretty simple and it is. The trouble with Nimble Quest lies in its impracticability in fluid game play. If you get hit by poison from a venomous spider, or get slashed by a knight’s sword (knights are unfortunately turned villains here!) in any of the higher levels, you start all over again from the forest. There are 16 heroes in Nimble Quest and you can start off with any hero you like. Some heroes are better leading the pack, while others do a better job from behind. Since you’ll be replaying the game many many times, you can play the different roles until you find one that works well for you.
Nimble Quest’s game play itself is fun. You need to swipe left or right to get the heroes marching in the direction you want. The game sometimes tricks you into picking up power ups located very close to the walls and you really need to have nimble fingers to make quick smart turns or you might end up smashing against the walls and getting back to where you started from. The action is pretty fast paced and it gets mighty tricky when your line of heroes starts getting longer. Sometimes there’s so much explosion on the screen – poison webs spewing, bombs blowing up, flames blazing all around and multiple villains striking at you from all directions, you really need your wits about you to keep up.
Its All About The Ka-Ching!
Nimble Quest’s biggest drawback is its replay factor. Starting back from level one after you’ve crossed five or six levels is no fun. Trust me. And if you don’t want to start all over again, ( and you won’t), you will need to trade tokens. Tokens are next to impossible to get from game play and the only reasonable way to get them is using IAPs. Tokens range from under a dollar to under fourteen and you can use these tokens to get extra lives, special powers, or buy heroes. You can also unlock special red gems that have double the power of average gems. The gems help you upgrade your power ups such as magnets, healing portions, bombs, ice blocks and shields. For instance, you can trade in 250 gems for an extra chest of gems, increase the potion healing, attack speed and magnet duration; increase the blast radius or shield strength, and ice duration. Nimble Quest also features a mode called Arena, which requires tokens (read more money spending) to play. In the arena mode you can play against global players and compete for top scores. Nimblebit have cleverly manipulated their IAP system, giving you just enough to play on without paying, and yet ensuring that you don’t get anywhere without ringing their cash registers.
Sights And Sounds Of Nimble Quest
The pixelated cartoon-style graphics in Nimble Quest are certainly not the highlights of the game. But for a simple board game the colors and backgrounds do just enough. The retro-themed music plays out perfectly well with the game play. Thankfully, the music changes with each level you play so you don’t have to put up with the same tune as you play over and over again, at least for awhile.
Cash It Or Trash It?
Nimble Quest is definitely an engaging game, if played in short bursts. There’s quite a lot of action, its well designed, there are no lags in game play, is very easy to understand, is challenging and fun. Where it slightly falters is in its lack of memorable heroes, storyline or purpose and since you don’t really get to progress very far, you’re left completely dissatisfied and shallow. Where Nimble Quest completely puts you off is when you know that you got to spill a bunch of coins to get to some serious game play. While the game is addicting, so is the desire to cash out some tokens and then some more… and maybe a little more too! If you’re just in for some intense casual gaming, and don’t really care about repetitive game play, Nimble Quest will be good fun. And definitely much better fun than that classic game Snake.
