Lock’s Quest

For now, we’ll have to stick with what could be the best hybridization of RTS and action on the DS to date. Lock’s Quest, a game developed by the creators of Drawn to Life got lots of hype at E3 2008 for being one of the more unique games on the DS to date. Making excellent use of the DS’s touch screen capabilities, this game also gave hopeful gamers one heck of a trailer to whet their appetites. Only a few months after E3, how has the game finished out and does it live up to the hype that it’s received over the past few months?

Introduction

“We know three constants: Our King, Source, and the Archineer. Source is a resource tied to a place beyond our knowledge. Archineers use Source to build our world. The greatest of the Archineers was Agonius. He was the Architect of Our Nation. He was determined to unlock the mystery behind Source, and use it to create life. The King knew the dangers of this desire. He demanded Agonius halt this work. Infuriated, Agonius refused and was banished from the nation. He assumed the mantle of Lord Agony, and created a clockwork army. A great war broke out, pitting clockwork versus kingdom. The world teetered on the brink of destruction. A last ditch assault was launched into the heart of the Clockwork nation. Several Archineers broke through the lines, and stormed Agony’s fortress. It is unknown how they defeated Agony. There was an explosion… and the war ended. There have been years of peace, punctured by an occasional whisper of Agony reborn. These whispers reach an unlikely place. A seaside village…Home to a young man fated to change the world.”

How about that for a beginning sequence to get you interested? The story begins as Lock, a boy who lives with his grandfather Tobias and sister Emi, finds an Archineer named Isaiah staggering into their town. With little time to prepare, Lock is forced to play the role as hero and go into battle to defend against a small group of Clockwork headed toward their town Source Well. After saving Isaiah’s life, Lock and his family must escape the town and are thrown into an epic battle between Clockwork and Kingdom Force.

The beginning battle sequence does a great job of introducing gamers to a few of the intricacies of the gameplay, as this game has a lot of interesting mechanics to learn throughout your experience. This game consistently succeeds in giving a clear explanation of the new gaming mechanics and it never lets up on providing you with new buildings, moves, etc. throughout your adventure. This is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game because it keeps the battles fresh throughout your experience.

The game’s most notable game mechanics feature a two stage battle system where players fortify their base defenses in a building stage and then attack your foes and repair your base during an action mode. The game successfully uses both styles of gameplay to seamlessly provide an unparalleled hybrid of RPG and action gameplay. And, as your arsenal of moves and defenses further increase, the difficulty ramps up to provide a truly hardcore game for DS owners who have longed for a strong RTS. It’s difficult to approach reviewing the gameplay without having a set section for both stages of battle so here begins the look at this game’s mechanics:

Build Phase

What kind of RTS game would this be without giving you the ability to build structures? Lock’s Quest gives players many options when building the defenses around their castle/town/well. First of all, there are black areas that show you where the enemy Clockworks will be coming from. This gives you an idea of the key choke points that you need to fortify. There is a grid over all of the areas that you can build and anywhere on the grid is fair game. That means there is complete creative freedom when it comes to building the defenses around your base.

The Build Phase provides gamers with a few minutes of building time between each round and two different building side bars to choose which structures to build (all with controlled by the stylus). First, let’s go over the buttons on the two side bars and what they do. The “tool box” on the right of the screen has many different options including structure types, a wrench for repairing damaged structures, left & right arrows for rotating pieces, swirling arrows for demolishing a structure to get money back, a place object button, and a battle button to skip to battle phase.

Once you press any of the four structure type buttons (Wall segments, Turrets, Traps, Helpers), the second side bar appears on the bottom of the screen. This provides players with their choice of structures of that type. There are six different choices for each of the four structure types, leading to a plethora of choices at your disposal. Because “Archineers use Source to build our world” the unit of currency in this game is precisely source. Source can be collected by defeating enemy Clockwork and grabbing a small blue flame that is left behind (you can also attain source from minigames found during the game).

So, now for building strategies. Obviously, you have to have turrets to attack your enemies. These forms of defense range from turrets that damage their foes to ones that can stop enemies in place. It’s important to have a good combination of turrets on each front to affect the enemies in different ways. However, you should never overpopulate an area with turrets because their defense is tied to the amount of straight walls attached to them. Thus, if you line your defenses with only turrets and no walls, your defenses will run thin (despite the offensive power) and the scores of enemies will surely topple your structures. So, the best strategy is to find the perfect amount of turrets and line them with some walls here or there to improve their structural integrity. Also, as you get further into the game, you’ll find new building materials such as stone to increase the strength of the walls even further (at a higher price).

One helpful feature when placing down walls and turrets is an auto-align feature that will rotate the current block you are holding according to the walls around it. This helps to shave off some seconds provided you use it properly but it can also be a nuisance: sometimes you may have the wall facing the right direction and you might move it across an open wall. The auto-align feature may think you are trying to put the piece there when in reality you’re headed for a different spot. This causes the block to rotate and can take a few seconds to get it right.

The next step to a sound defense is using traps. These traps can be placed anywhere along the building grid and can do anything from spewing poison to harm foes to freezing them temporarily to even creating a magic barrier that prevents spells from being used in a certain area. These are essential to whittle down the hits and movement of the enemies so your turrets can do the rest. The downside, however, is that though turrets and walls withstand the entire battle provided you keep them repaired, traps only last for one round and must be placed again after each day.

Finally, the last piece to defending your territory is the use of helper bots. These patrol areas and perform certain functions such as repairing walls, increasing the range of cannons, or even the strength of such cannons. Again, these bots are essential to your survival in some of the later missions but only last for one round at a time.

Attack Phase

Once you’ve placed all of your defenses around the battlefield, it’s now time to attack the enemy. There are many different types of missions that you’ll embark on in the campaign but the most common involves building your defenses and then fighting off continuous waves of enemies as the Clockwork throw different combinations of troops at your defenses. Enemies come in all shapes and sizes including hammer troops, enemies that charge at walls, archers, magi, healers, flyers and even invisible ones. Thus, it’s important to find the right combination of defenses in the build stage that will best defend your base.

Given control over Lock, players can do many different actions in helping defend their castle. The two most basic commands are attacking enemies and repairing structures (both done by tapping the respective targets). As you play the various missions, these two actions will be the entirety of your gameplay though each action has its own subset of abilities to spice things up. For instance, when repairing walls, players can play a micro game at the bottom of the touch screen where they drag a lever left, right, left, etc to perform the ratcheting technique. This improves the amount of HP that Lock can repair on each structure he touches.

Attacking is equally important as it helps to slow enemy progress down before they reach the main line of defense. Lock must be careful though because if he is attacked too much, his life meter will deplete and the mission will have to be started over. Attacking follows the same trend as repairing by providing micro games for each attack you perform and you select each attack at the top left corner of the screen. The game for normal attack involves tapping circles in the right order. For a poison attack, Lock must spin a gear a certain amount of times in a given direction. To drain hits, Lock must slide horizontal sliders and to freeze enemies temporarily, he has to flip switches either up or down. All of the micro games last for only a second or two and if you don’t perform them this quickly or you do the wrong motion, the special attack will fail.

Another ability Lock attains is the ability to use super abilities. In order to trigger a super ability, Lock must first have enough energy stored up on his Super Meter (this can be done by attacking, being attacked, or by simply repairing structures). The key to super abilities is to tap a button that appears onscreen as many times as possible as each tap you do counts towards the overall effectiveness of the move. You receive these moves gradually through the game as well, and the first move you learn is called Lightning, where each tap takes down a little bit of life from all of the enemies onscreen. Other moves include Goo Storm which slows and damages all enemies on screen for a period after the attack is performed, Money Drop which causes all enemies to drop Source onto the battlefield, and Repair All which repairs all structures a little for each tap. These super abilities are crucial to winning some battles so it’s important to always stay active to help get your meter up.

As you destroy enemies, you’ll also find random pieces of scrap laying around the battlefield. If you collect enough pieces, you should be able to create a new turret or defense. Creating these involves a short mini game where players select the 4 correct pieces that will make the picture shown in the top right hand of the touch screen.

The mission that players must accomplish varies for each different situation. In the typical protect-style missions, players will alternate days building defenses and attacking the enemy for several turns. Other missions include destroying pre-deployed enemies, saving hostages, killing units before they escape, and even defending multiple fronts of enemies. The difference in battle style along with the continual addition of structures and special moves throughout the game is what makes this game enjoyable from start to finish. But if you were expecting it to be easy, think again. The game is targeted specifically to a more hardcore group of gamers and though it starts out easy at first, the game ramps up the difficulty quickly.

Lock’s Keys to Success

Aside from a fairly lengthy campaign (a total of 100 days which is around 20 hours of gameplay), Lock also provides a multiplayer mode for players to battle their friends via multi-card battle. Multiplayer basically plays the same way as single player mode where players take a few minutes to bolster their defenses and then spend time attacking. The battle screen looks identical for both players but the key difference is that players are given the ability to choose which troops they will send to attack their opponent. Overall, the multiplayer is enjoyable but there is tons of room for improvement (more options, more rules, possibly even a co-op?).

The game isn’t too flashy in its visuals but it also doesn’t lose any framerate in the process. Hordes of enemies can be attacking your base at any time and the framerate will continue as it should. The music is also enjoyable with an epic soundtrack including tons of lengthy songs that play through the adventure. The biggest problems with the soundtrack, though, is that the instruments are very midi-esque, and the battle music never changes. As for the game’s story, it’s enjoyable but it isn’t anything to write home about. I do love the beautiful cut screens along with the incredible beginning sequence that gets you pumped for the game.

Priced at $29.99, Lock’s quest is a great game for the money and has plenty of depth for players to get their money’s worth. And, though the amount of variation in gameplay is high throughout your adventure, the amount of replay value is low because there are no special options once you beat the game. A way to make this game utterly addictive would be to add some sort of RPG elements to the mix where Lock could choose skills, upgrade them, don equipment, and players could possibly even choose their own upgrades for defenses. The possibilities would be endless with some RPG elements so if a sequel is a possibility, this would be the best form of upgrade (as well as a more robust multiplayer.