Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff Review

Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff for Android and iOS is a city-builder, in the same vein as The Simpsons: Tapped Out. With the two shows constantly being compared to one another, it’s impossible to not compare the games. Especially when they both start with the city being destroyed and needing rebuilding.

Of course, this being Family Guy, it starts with Peter Griffin and Ernie the Giant Chicken once more fighting each other to the death. In a twist, Ernie doesn’t defy death by surviving normal-chicken-killing final blows, he wins! But Peter survives too, making it an anticlimax, but also a great MacGuffin as it turns out that their fight caused the destruction of everything in Quahog.

Peter fears he’s the sole survivor of the carnage, so quickly breaks the fourth wall to talk to you via speech bubbles next to a few frames of animation. He tells you to get him to rebuild his house so he can find his family, or probably just the refrigerator. Except being a red-blooded Caucasian American, he gets immigrant labour to do it. Once he is finished, it unlocks Chris Griffin which gives you two characters to earn money with. After all, you can’t rebuild a town without hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also gain xp which levels them up to be able to do more jobs. It also unlocks the premium currency - golden Clams.

The thing that really Grinds My Gears is that not long after unlocking the third character, you are given a quest that requires you to spend $4.99 on in-game money. If you don’t, it’s stuck there on your quest bar for the duration of the game. Some freemium games are called Pay To Win because earning premium currency takes so long, you feel that you can’t do anything for long periods of time without buying it. Having a quest which actually requires you to spend real money makes this an actual Pay To Win game.

As with most city-builder mobile games, you must wait for a period of time for characters to do things. This starts off as several seconds, to get you hooked; as it should, as the first task taking two hours would mean you either uninstalled or forgot about the game by then. You can speed things up or unlock characters easier by using Clams, though it’s not a requirement - you can wait for tasks to finish. It waits until your third character to give you an hour-long task, meaning you can do other things or simply wait.

Each character sports their own experience bar in addition to the main one. Whereas their own dictates which jobs they can do, the main one unlocks more areas and buildings/decorations. To select a task, you need to tap on a character (which was a little inaccurate during my play time) which opens a box with the list of tasks on the right and the character on the left. Then drag a task into the thought bubble above the character’s head which initiates the task. This was helpful, as tapping the wrong task only to lose the character for 24 hours would be quite a nuisance. The task will also list whether it gives you items and what percent chance of that is.

Items are used to unlock characters - certain characters want five of this and three of that, before they will unlock for you to use. This can be skipped with currency, though it could only take you eight-to-ten hours if you’re lucky given the random drop rates of items. Items are also used to unlock costumes for characters, which in turn unlocks more jobs for them to do.

To give you some more to do, you can check out each character’s FaceSpace page as you unlock them. They are updated periodically as they level up, showing the writers have a feel for each character’s specific voice. For example, Peter’s posts are mostly about being hungry, Chris’ are all in capitals; and liked by Herbert.

Speaking of the writers - the humour is clearly here. As you’d expect, it leans towards the adult, though anything that seems explicit is a euphemism to a tamer joke. This means kids could play it - though I wouldn’t recommend it.

You can sign up for an account, or sign in with Facebook or Google. When you unlock the ability to travel the Multiverse with Stewie, if you are signed in with Facebook you can check out their Quahog’s. Otherwise you’re just stuck visiting a version of Quahog run by Ollie Williams - Ollieland. Visiting other towns gets you coins and experience by tapping on residents. However once you are able to go, it unlocks another quest you will be unable to get rid of; unless you enjoy annoying your Facebook friends with invites to games they don’t play. You must invite five people, or you’re stuck.

The graphics are very true to the source and smooth running. Several decorations you can put in are animated too, such as the Open Fire Garden exploding if you tap it, the flames simply dancing it you just watch it. The characters are not restricted to the roads to walk around and placing more road is pretty easy. Dragging buildings to place them is a little hit-and-miss, meaning it may take you a couple of tries to get it in the right position.

No doubt Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff will grow past the current 19 characters and 6 districts that are currently available and it will be interesting to see whether they do seasonal events. If the hit-zones on the characters and buildings is fixed, it will make this pretty fun experience even more enjoyable.