Combo Quest (iOS) Review

Combo Quest takes the grind of RPG battles and the pressure of Rogue-likes and boils everything down to a rhythm game. I'm sure that on some level the developers of Combo Quest are making a statement about those kinds of games, but let's just stick to the gameplay here. While statements are all well and good, the reason most of would want to play games is that it is fun so let's see if Combo Quest meets that qualification.

Combo Quest is an infinite battler of sorts in that you move from one one-on-one battle with a monster to the next, to the next, to the next ' until you die. And when you do die, it's the end of your quest and your game. The next time you play you'll start all over again from the beginning, as if you've never played the game before at all.

You do your battling on a bar that sits on the lower half of the screen. A cursor moves along the bar in one direction until it reaches the end of the bar, at which point it reverses direction and heads the other way. As colored boxes appear on the bar you need to tap the screen as the cursor passes in front of one of the boxes. Some box colors indicate whether you will perform a normal strike or critical hit, while red boxes indicate enemy attacks. While the other boxes are static once they appear, the red boxes move towards one end of the bar and if one of them reaches the end before you tap it with the cursor then you will take some damage from the monster. As you progress further into the game new boxes with additional effects will begin to appear, such as ones that will accelerate the cursor speed or shield boxes that cover the hit boxes as the move and that take several hits to destroy. Timing is important because if you tap the screen while nothing is under the cursor you'll take some damage, which also means that wild speed-tapping is not a valid tactic in the game.

Below the main bar sits a combo meter that can, when filled by five straight hits, be used to unleash a powerful attack on your enemy. As you string successive successful taps together you'll build the multiplier on your combo meter, but if you have a miss before you use a combo, the meter will be completely reset. As the battle progresses the cursor begins to move faster with each successful hit, so as the multiplier increases you run an ever greater risk of losing it completely.

If you win a battle, you'll be given the opportunity to select an upgrade from a list of three random options. These upgrades include increasing your min or max damage, increasing your max health, or restoring you to full health. This adds a minor bit of strategy into the game in that you can try focusing your upgrades into on attribute such as damage or health, and since you start over each time you die you can experiment with different combinations of upgrades.

That's pretty much all there is to the game. If you're the competitive type, leaderboards will let you compare your biggest combo and best number of enemies defeated in a game against other gamers. Combat Quest is one of those simple games that take seconds to play and is good for killing a short wait time with your phone, but that you wish had just a little more to it. You can use infinite runners as a judge of whether or not you'll like the game, as Combo Quest is pretty similar to them on a basic level - time your screen taps to stay alive as along as possible and start all over again when you die.

Final Rating: 70%