DestinyQuest: Infinte Part 3 Review

DESTINYQUEST: INFINITE P3

This is the third part of a three part article series. You can see parts One and Two for my impressions of the first two acts. This iteration was a strong improvement over the previous two acts.  With that, I say that I was...

GENUINELY ENTERTAINED

This game is a choose your own adventure, first and foremost. You make a decision, you get rewarded/ punished. This is a tried and true formula that I feels the creators really managed to flesh out in this last act. They did a great job with item balance and story progression. 4.25/5. Will probably play again.

PLAYABILITY

Good job on this one. I feel they definitely have found their groove on this act. The easy missions were easy. The next tier was, to me, a difficult but approachable experience. The difficulty tier after that made me tense. However, I never felt under geared, and I always felt like the rewards were actually rewarding in a way to fit my play style. I choose the Warrior, and was given solid armor. I focused on gaining more armor. I almost always got more armor, or the same amount of armor with a decent boost in another stat. I was able to negate usually several points of damage off the damage die every time, so I could take my take and whittle down my opponents. The mechanics of the game are the same, which was already solid. Although, the longer battles can take a while. I was fighting a boss for a good 45 minutes one time. He couldn't hit me, and I was only dealing 2 damage a turn. He had 120 health. It took a while. Otherwise, the pacing is usually pretty good. Even in the longer fights, there are technically sections to give you that small "Woohoo!" moments. That boss I mentioned was actually a minion with 20 health, and a big-bad with 100 health.  You defeat the smaller minion, and you get that sense of "I've made progress".

STORY

The story for this act was the most engaged I felt of the three acts. I quickly became attached to the characters, and became genuinely concerned with the outcome. The choices I made were that much more difficult because I actually cared about NPCs, and not just choosing a few choices here and there for things I am not invested. My qualms with the first two acts were, as far as I could tell, rectified with this act. Defeat no longer means you are stuck in the story, it merely hinders your progression, and you miss on some finer details on the story. There was one missions where I had to defend a mountain top against marauding undead. Well, I was on the last wave and I was defeated. Normally, this would set me back and I would get stuck on this boss. Instead, they wrote in a defeat routine where it gracefully segued the story to the next mission with my defeat part of the story. That was legitimately entertaining. I felt that, at that point, the creators were trying to tell me a story and not just make a game.

EXECUTION

I really felt this act had the most entertainment value of the three. I would actually go so far as recommend getting this purely for act 3, then playing acts 1 and 2 as backstory. There was story there, I feel it just isn't as accessible unless you really have a good feel of what you are doing.