Rage Quest

TLDR: Rage Quest offers a unique and complex battle system that has a bit of a learning curve but is challenging and rewarding to play. Rage Quest is a game with a simple story and complex gameplay. The game itself is relatively short and took me 6-7 hours to get through when trying to finish all the content. Although the story is dry and parts of the game is clunky and slightly unintuitive the meat of the game, the battle system, is fun and satisfying. The battle system takes traditional tile based combat and puts a spin on it making timing as well as strategy matter. Removing the traditional turns, each move used by the player as well as enemies has a charge time as well as a cooldown, all visible on the map. This means that timing your actions allows you to and prevents enemies from dodging attacks. The game gives the player three categories to freely sort their actions (abilities, items, movement, defense) into, and only one action from each category can be performed at once. This means that you are able to bring a maximum of 12 different actions into a stage but only 3 can be used at the same time. A player may choose to attack with three different attacks at once but they will not be able to guard or evade while doing so. All of these aspects gives the combat of Rage Quest surprising depth (as well as somewhat of a steep learning curve). The amount of unique abilities and items allow for a plethora of ways to approach each stage and good balancing helps this. Rage Quest's levels are quite difficult and do not pull any punches even at the beginning. Each encounter is tense but very rewarding to complete, especially when done by a strategy of your own devising (after perhaps failing a few times). With almost 70 encounters throughout 4 worlds to fight through, Rage Quest provides a decent amount of content for its price.

You play as a character named Zye that woke up in the internet and is trying to get back to reality. It may look like a shallow shell of a game from the screenshots, but it's very much the opposite. It honestly felt like more of a puzzle sometimes than a turn based battle... but then again, I wasn't paying attention to signs (I tend to skip through storyline and focus on gameplay) and didn't realize you could upgrade your stats at first, and every battle started becoming a chore. PAY ATTENTION TO THE TEXTS! It can help save you from the struggles of raging... I mean, unless you want a challenge. I completed the entire first world up to the boss without upgrading my stats, so I know it's possible. Pros A very unique time based layout of a real time tactical strategy game. It's very easy to get used to, but hard to keep up with all the time The tutorial doesn't treat you like an idiot and try to hold your hand the entire time The jokes and art style are on point, and the atmosphere is very engrossing for the context of the game You can tailor your character to your play style Interacting with NPCs can reward you with more than just nonsense or lore You can replay fights to grind for currency if you feel underpowered It's literally $1, with four worlds (I have only beaten the first world and took a peek at the second at the time of this review and have almost 2 hours of playtime on it. You can't get a better price for content, even when it's free you usually end up paying somehow... and after playing this, I would've gladly payed $5-10 for this and still been completely content. I'm astonished at the price, and expected a much worse game, which is probably why it doesn't have a ton of reviews because I know I tend to avoid games that are so cheap) The worlds are different with different enemies and a slight change to the atmosphere including different attributes, actions, and battlefield obstacles/powerups Cons You can select stuff your character cannot actually do because it's time based off actions. It's not a big problem and it's understandable why (You can use an ability without having AP for it, then use an item to get the AP after and it would work or you could set an attack for a place you can't reach but move before the attack would finish charging to reach it). I get the reasoning, I would just love a way to be able to cancel an action in progress instead of accidentally clicking on the wrong spot, having to wait out my mess up, and losing whatever AP or item I just wasted. If you toggle fullscreen mode on in the options and you click on the top of the page, it makes it fit to screen size (You can set the screen size. The biggest mine will go is 1600x900). It's absolutely awful to have that happen in the middle of a match (especially when you've used all your pauses). I know this is because it's fullscreen windowed mode and the bar blends in with the background, but if I try to alt+enter to fullscreen, and the game crashes (This happened to me every time I tried it, which is normal for me when loading games so luckily it's only when I'm opening it) I don't have anything else bad to say about this game. I didn't run into any other bugs, I have exited and come back and my save still existed (tested because there's no quit option in the game), everything worked out as described, the gameplay is engrossing and doesn't feel repetitive, I judge price by an hour for $1 and this already exceeds that by far, and the sounds in the game fit well and aren't destructive to the game (I do mute all music and listen to my own though so I know nothing about the BGM). Honestly, this is one of the best games I've found lately after returning to Steam, and I hope more people will find it and try it out. Great job, this game is AMAZING! and I hope to see more from you in the future... although it's been almost 4 years now so I may be a bit late