Monday 17 October 2011

Costume Quest [QUICK&SHORT] [PS3]

Overview
It's Halloween and you play the role of Reynold, a young boy off trick-or-treating 
wearing his best robot costume with his twin sister in tow. Suddenly, a monster attacks from out of nowhere and kidnaps your dear sibling and it's left up to you to save her - and the rest of the town - from alien monsters!

Major Points
Novel Concept - the unique selling point here being that as you put on new costumes you take on each costume's powers. This works well and gives a nice variety of options to go into battle with (Turn-Based-RPG/Quick-Time-Event style).

Cute, but Adult Cute - yes, it's colourful and inoffensive and you're a young kid playing dress-up but it's that type of cute which is clearly written with adults/semi-adults in mind (a la Spongebob). Subtle humour and pop culture references bounces off childrens ears with no harm done while adults giggle (ashamedly).
Much, much, much too bloody short and easy - fine, maybe I'm asking too much for a game I got free and is probably aimed at children but I was done with this in 5 hours (practically 100% too) and I didn't feel desperately challenged once I'd got my costume/abilities set-up how I wanted it.

Conclusion
A nice (though annoyingly short) romp with an charming quirkiness that is present throughout the game. It really is nice to see a game that sticks to a strong theme in every element.

The game is both accessible and functional meaning that a non-gamer could come in and pick the game up fairly easily, with all usual RPG-stat-studying out the window.
Sadly, this means that for a regular gamer the difficulty level never picks up and ends rather promptly - either because it hopes you'll fork out more for extra missions or perhaps simply because it ran out of steam and funky ideas.


*By the way, this was one of the games I got FREE (see http://eclectic-review.blogspot.com/2011/10/ps3-review-update-october-2011-1st.html for more info). As such I can't really complain that much but would certainly say that you should not under any circumstances pay more than a tenner for this. If you do, you'll beat the TV screen to pieces once you find yourself at the end credits before the pot of tea has brewed.

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