Deity Quest Review

If there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s Pokémon - and a game that sees you setting monsters against each other on a quest to fight your rival, seems pretty Pokémon to me. Deity Quest sees you converting monsters into followers, which means they fight for you until they’re knocked out if not before, and can be swapped about and replaced outside of battle.

The deity in question is yourself, and your graduating class (including your rival), who have been sent into the wider cosmos to rule over planets. Or something - the beginning is super vague and only sets up some generic rivalry between yourself and your gendered opposite. So your first task is to gather and train some followers which are usually monsters such as dragons, jellyfish and giant spiders. Once you feel they are trained enough, you select four to go with you to face your rival and prove who the better god is! The story goes on after that, but I won’t spoil more than the first hour of the game.

So you’re sent to a planet with your rival tagging along to prove she’s so much better than you - rather than living her own life and proving it that way. Your quest is to become the Overgod on the planet to show you’re better than the other deity on the planet. The plot is simple, though the gameplay is extremely simple.

To gather followers and level them up, you need to explore areas filled with them. In most cases you can see exactly what you’re going to fight and decide whether or not to do so as they are all shown on the map. There is the occasional ambush however, especially during quests, which pits you against random enemies. The battles go on automatically though you have a little bit of input with health items as well as when you level up and gain access to spells. You have limited mana to cast them, and usually have to use that to cast Convert on the enemy - which is how you gain them as a follower.

The worst thing about the automatic battles, I experienced when I had lost all but two followers without killing a single one of the enemy team. But then the enemy ran out of mana and couldn’t attack: yet neither of mine were attacking either. I waited for something to happen for a couple of minutes, yet still mine were using their support moves. I had to click on them and deselect the support moves so they could only attack, then I won in under a minute.

The graphics are where the game falls apart as a PC game. It is clearly a mobile game that has been ported to PC - it just so happens to be a direct port. The graphics are terrible, and not because they are sprite-based. There are tons of games with strong sprite-based graphics: Deity Quest is not one of them. There is no animation from the follower sprites and the maps are nearly nonsensical - it doesn’t help that there is significant blurring on many screens while playing fullscreen. And what PC gamer doesn’t want to play fullscreen?

The graphics and boring battles hurt the score immensely, as the game does have variety in followers - 128 different beings, ranging from eels to eyeballs. If it had more interesting graphics and a better fight mechanic, this could rate higher, even with the fairly basic story. Maybe for Deity Quest 2.