Saturday, 17 March 2018

Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Remastered


This is another game I bought a while ago but have no recollection of why or on what basis. It’s not quick and it’s not really easy either so I can only assume that I saw someone else playing it and applied a rationale of, ‘it looks easy and all the achievements are offline so I’ll get it.’

Letter Quest follows the story of Grimm as he tries to get pizza. He leaves his house and has to go through various forests and cemeteries battling monsters in a unique way in order to get to the pizza place. It seems like they weren’t offering delivery on this particular night.

The battles consist of having to spell words from a grid of 15 letters that deal damage based on the score of the word. The letters scores are based loosely on Scrabble so unless you are really good at Scrabble you will be working with mostly five and six letter words to kill most of the enemies.

Some of the battles you fight have unique modifiers that allow to deal extra damage by using tiles in a certain way; double letters, tiles from the bottom row, words of x number of letters. However, some of these are sinfully annoying. My personal favourites are ones that mean the enemies cannot be damaged by words of more than 4 or 5 letters. This means that you have to spell lots of words in order to kill the smallest of enemies.

There are two game modes to play – story mode and endless mode. Story mode sees you go on your quest for pizza and you can play each level up to four times for stars. Endless modes requires you to continuously killing monsters until you die.

In story mode, you can earn coins and upgrade your equipment to make life easier, whereas endless mode you just go for it and can buy power-ups and health periodically from some random dude who turns up to sell you shit.

Outside of the gameplay, in terms of graphics it’s a 2D side-scrolling cartoon and musically, some of the best music I’ve heard in a game for a while. It’s original piano scores for the most part that were enjoyable to listen to right up to the end of the game. It began to wear itself out towards the end though but that’s only because it takes an age to get all of the…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 60 Achievements

At first, these will come relatively quickly, especially if you have employed a word unscrambler to turn your 15 letters into something that makes sense. A lot of the achievements are for doing certain things like killing monsters, spelling x amount of words with 6, 7 or 8 letters, using specific tiles to spell words and dealing set amounts of damage. Seriously there are loads and to many to list.

The only ones that gave me any real trouble were the ones for getting an entire grid to be filled with plague tiles and duplicator tiles. These boil down to luck as you have to be fighting specific monsters and they have to not attack you in a certain way otherwise it will interfere with the board being filled. Both of these were frustrating standalone achievements.

The end game achievements were just time consuming in the end. You have to complete every level in story mode 4 times to get all of the stars. This takes an age but bizarrely was still not long enough for me to score 100 critical hits. You have a ridiculously low critical hit chance even when you equip stuff that maximises your chances of getting one.

Once these lot are done, you will be at the end of story mode with just the endless mode achievements and spelling loads of words left. By the time I started endless mode, I still had around 1,000 words left before I hit the 2,500 target. Thankfully this didn’t unlock too long after I got to the end of endless mode… achievements wise anyway.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Letter Quest was quite fun and charming at first but if you are going to go for all the achievements, it quite quickly turns into a slog. I had to stop playing at several points as boredom set in and I needed a break. It’s good to have played one of these word games, but I won’t be doing it again.

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