It Came From Canada: Beast Quest

Figuring out how to best preview Beast Quest, the upcoming action RPG from Miniclip, proved to be surprisingly difficulty. This isn’t a judgment on the game’s quality, but it really does feel like a bunch of pieces from other, more famous games stitched together. So in this edition of It Came From Canada!, I’m just going to describe those pieces and how they find a way to fit together.

Beast Quest's general structure resembles any other casual RPG on the App Store. Players complete various short quests like gathering X amount of treasures or killing X amounts of enemies to level-up and take on the next major story mission. Those story missions revolve around the overarching goal of killing the elusive boss monster, giving the game a Monster Hunter or even a Shadow of the Colossus vibe. The combat is straight out of Infinity Blade, except players just tap a button instead of swiping to attack. However, while that control choice is nicely streamlined, holding a run button and moving the camera to steer the character feels even clunkier by comparison. The impressively large, dense, and snowy initial open world is a like a very, very light version of Skyrim, and by climbing “eagle peaks,” players gain a cinematic panoramic view of the landscape to flesh out their map, Assassin’s Creed-style.

That’s a lot of disparate influences. So how well do they fit together? Let’s put it this way: while the game is full of many beastly creatures, Beast Quest itself most resembles is a successful Frankenstein's Monster. By taking all of these proven ideas and applying them in the places where they make the most sense, few parts of the game feel lazy or weaker than each other. The individually strong parts strengthen the whole. Even the vague fantasy setting is generic and receptive enough to include these nakedly obvious inspirations without suffering any kind of tonal or mechanical whiplash.

Beast Quest is currently in a soft launch phase and will be launching everywhere soon. So it won’t be too long before you can decide whether or not this surprisingly seamless hodgepodge works for you.