The SteamWorld series has gone from strength to strength thanks in part to its incredibly varied gameplay – with the metroidvania style of Dig & Dig 2 alongside the XCom-esque approach in Heist. SteamWorld Quest sees developer Image & Form’s first foray into the realm of RPGs, and it’s an undeniably brilliant one.

You’re tasked with leading a band of aspiring heroes throughout a beautifully hand-drawn world in an attempt to save the world whilst battling evil along the way. Armilly, Copernica, Galleo and the whole rest of the likeable cast of characters are undoubtedly some of the best developer Image & Form have created yet, with far more personality than previously portrayed in their past titles.

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Whilst the overarching story is a fairly generic one, the amusing lighthearted back and forths, regular quips and conversations all help to keep things flowing from beginning to end. I even found myself becoming fairly attached to the characters by the time the credits rolled. You directly control a character in exploring the world by navigating between small areas; discovering secrets, opening chests, attacking objects and enemies to get the upper hand in a battle.

The majority of your time in SteamWorld Quest will be spent in those battles, of which are by far the star of the show. Despite the first 20-30 minutes or so feeling a little simplistic, Quest quickly starts to expand on the battle concepts building out some great mechanics.

The game utilises a turn-based card-focused combat system. You build a deck of cards for each character, of which you can have three in your party at a time. Each deck must contain 8 cards. During combat you’ll draw a hand of cards at random from your characters’ three decks. Unlike most turn-based RPGs each character doesn’t have to attack. Instead you get to play three cards from your hand, which can consist of a single character’s cards or a mix and match of any. You can even swap out a few cards in your hand each turn too for a random draw from your decks.

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Quest begins to layer on the complexity early, introducing mechanics such as Heroic Chains where you play three cards from the same character’s deck and in turn get an extra ability – ranging from bleed attacks to defensive barriers for the full team. There’s even combo attacks – cards which require you to play a following card from a specific character’s deck to produce enhanced effects.

Amongst this there’s all the usual range of status effects such as lowering or bolstering elemental resistances, sleep, paralysis, bleed, and a whole lot more. The deck based approach ends up having an effect on every element of the game’s combat – if a character dies for example whilst you still might draw their cards, they’ll be useless whilst that character remains dead. Or if a specific status effect such as confusion is applied to that character, then all of their cards will be affected, but the rest of the party’s won’t.

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Alongside that cards either build up cogs (a power meter), or spend them. More powerful cards require a set amount of cogs before they can be played, with some spending any available to bolster their strength. Enemies play by the same rules too, with some visibly building to special attacks. Each have various strengths and weaknesses which are clearly displayed via the information view too.

The result of all this is a super blend of traditional turn-based RPG combat, mixed in with a series of complex yet easy to grasp card and deck building mechanics. Quest does a brilliant job of gradually layering on the various systems and mechanics. The whole thing is an absolute blast to wrap your head around.

Cards can be found throughout the game’s world, from hidden chests to rewards along the standard quest path. You can also craft and upgrade cards using resources dished out after each battle. There’s even RPG-style equipment to deck out your characters with, providing various stat bonuses, and weapons to discover which not only improve stats but even introduce new abilities.

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I didn’t encounter any bugs throughout my time playing the game whatsoever, and there’s of course no microtransactions in sight. That said, I did find some cards to be underpowered in comparison to others – there may be a little bit of potential fine tuning here.

I actually ended up building a pretty solid series of decks with three specific characters about mid-way through the game which I stuck with throughout the entire rest of the experience. Whilst other characters and other cards were dished out, any attempts at experimenting with those often lead to worse results. My Armilly was capable of huge physical damage, with Copernica providing essential damage barriers and massive magic damage, alongside a tanky Galleo with a whopping health pool, healing skills and defensive boosts. This build seemed capable of handling anything the game threw at me – on the standard difficulty, granted. It is worth mentioning I felt a significant difficulty spike in the game’s final few chapters however.

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The game does feature a harder difficulty for those wanting a tougher challenge; folks looking to really fine tune and craft their builds. There’s certainly plenty of options here, with a myriad of cards to choose from, various characters to spec in vastly different ways, and equipment to spice things up further. The flexibility through the card and deck building system is ton of fun to experiment with and certainly feels fresh. SteamWorld Quest took me just over 12 hours to finish on the standard difficulty.

Developer Image & Form’s experience of working with their IP and toolset is clearly improving with every entry into the series. The game runs super smooth on the Switch, with almost non-existent load times, stable performance and a sharp image quality, helping to highlight the game’s beautiful hand-drawn art style.

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SteamWorld Quest is arguably the best SteamWorld game yet. Admittedly your opinion may vary best on genre preferences, but it certainly provides a brilliantly addictive blend of RPG and CCG mechanics wrapped up in a polished and attractive package. If there’s any criticism I can give it’s that I wish there was even more of it. I wholeheartedly recommend giving it a go.

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Charles is the editor of Gaming LYF. Self proclaimed industry news addict, currently researching ways to feed Twitter, Reddit and other news sources straight into his veins.
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