The Unexpected Quest Review

Developed by Rionix, The Unexpected Quest is a fairly basic real-time strategy game that has players collecting various resources in order to reach their goals. Is its simplicity a good thing, providing a relaxing, yet challenging title for fans of the genre? Or are the strategy and management elements too primitive?

The Unexpected Quest has a very easy to follow premise: a group of dwarves finds themselves shipwrecked, and it’s up to the player to guide them to collect enough food and materials to survive. There is a story here, told via unvoiced scenes between levels, but it’s not at all engaging and I wouldn’t be surprised if most players decided to skip the cutscenes.

Aesthetically, whilst it may look and sound like a title from the early 2000s, I found The Unexpected Quest to be charming and endearing. The bright, blocky fantasy look had me reminiscing of simpler times in my gaming life, and though some textures were quite a low resolution or just plain ugly, I still couldn’t help but be reminded of some classic PC titles from my youth.

Despite its labelling as an RTS, The Unexpected Quest takes a very minimalist approach to the genre. For starters, you won’t be spending any time directing units to certain points or bolstering your defences. Instead, you select an object in the world (food, enemies, buildings, etc) and one of the specific characters will go and fetch/fight/construct whatever it is you’ve clicked on. There is some semblance of strategy, for example, you won’t be able to destroy rubble in your path until you have enough food for your workers, so you’ll need to build a farm to grant you a steady stream of that particular resource. You aren’t able to freely place buildings, with each level having specific ones to construct, so it feels more like a step-by-step puzzle in which you gather enough resources to move on to the next step or open up a new part of the map.

It’s not a long game, either, with each of the eight chapters offering no replay value as there’s only ever one way to complete them. Unless you missed out on the optional treasure chests located in each one, there’s really no reason to revisit them. There are smaller quests in each area given to you by NPCs, but these are mostly just tasks you’ll be doing to finish the level anyway.

You are able to construct combat units (fighters, archers, and mages) to fend off the various enemies dotted about each level, but again this is overly simplistic. Once you’ve earned enough gold, you’ll open up the barracks and recruit whoever is needed to slay some bad guys. You will need to watch their health bars though, and a quick potion will get them fighting fit again, but other than that, there’s no tactical process involved. Just click an enemy, and wait for them to die.

The biggest issue, undoubtedly, is the fact that there isn’t much of a game here. Like mobile titles that require you to simply click to advance, The Unexpected Quest can’t really call itself a real-time strategy game, as there isn’t really any strategy involved. Click food, click resources, click barriers to remove, click buildings to construct, click an enemy to send a soldier after, rinse and repeat. Basically, there’s a lot of clicking involved (not ideal when playing the PlayStation 4 version, either).

Whilst The Unexpected Quest is quite charming, with its fantasy setting and unique character designs, it was much too basic to hold my attention and perhaps would have been best suited for mobiles. Perhaps some may enjoy the more streamlined and easy-to-master gameplay, but I can’t personally recommend this one.