Quest for Infamy Review
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Like a lot of RPGs, the combat in Quest for Infamy starts out difficult and then gets easy. The main culprit here is the block skill. As you use your combat skills, you increase their ratings, but once you reach 100 with block, it's guaranteed to be successful, which means you can use it to heal yourself whenever you want -- and thus defeat any enemy in the game, even the end boss, regardless of your other skills or equipment. This completely deflates the RPG aspect of the game, leaving Quest for Infamy as mostly an adventure.
Luckily, the adventure parts of the game aren't too bad. There are a lot of puzzles to solve, and some of them are obscure enough that you won't figure them out right away. There are also usually multiple ways to solve the puzzles, depending on if you want to be direct or tricky, or spend money on items or try to gain them for free. Better yet, because some quests are only available to some classes, you find a lot of items that you can't do anything with, and they work as red herrings, which adventure games these days don't include as often as they used to. Red herrings are always good in adventures because they increase the number of possible things you can do, preventing you from simply solving puzzles through trial and error.
Sadly, though, Quest for Infamy has three major problems that prevented me from enjoying it very much. The first is that it's almost a carbon copy of Quest for Glory I, except with an anti-hero instead of a hero. That doesn't necessarily sound bad, but developer Infamous Quests even copied the interface, and while people often get nostalgic for old games, it's not because of the interfaces. I can still enjoy a game even if it has old VGA-style graphics, but I'd just as soon avoid not having tooltips and scrollbars and quicksaves and context-sensitive cursors and other modern amenities. Plus, the more a new game looks and plays like an old game, the less reason there is for me to recommend it over the old game. In this case, you can buy all five of the Quest for Glory games for about half the price of Quest for Infamy, and no doubt enjoy them more.
The second problem is the writing quality, which doesn't even come close to the level found in the Quest for Glory games. Worse, the tone of the game is dramatically different. I guess because you're playing an anti-hero, Infamous Quests didn't want to have "nice" jokes and instead made a beeline straight for the gutter. In the first hour I played, I saw references to masturbation, drug use, hookers, sex with dogs, and STDs; there's a beheading complete with splurting blood; your character is allowed to urinate on all sorts of things; and "shit" was used almost every other word for some characters. And you don't even want to know about the "bush" jokes.
Infamous Quests was also a little lazy in their writing. Adventures can often create a lot of humor from when players get stuck and start trying out random inventory objects in random places, but in Quest for Infamy you almost always get a generic "you can't do that" response -- or the game calls you an idiot, which is one of its favorite pastimes. I laughed a lot when I played the Quest for Glory games, but not so much with Quest for Infamy.
Finally, the voice acting in Quest for Infamy is sort of odd and annoying. For some reason almost all of the secondary characters use bizarre accents, and even the main character mumbles his lines. If it hadn't been for the subtitles, I wouldn't have known what he was saying about half of the time. Since Quest for Infamy is a budget title, I'm sort of guessing the voice actors weren't professionals, or maybe this was an attempt at humor that just didn't work for me. Luckily, you can turn off the voices if you want and not have to deal with them.
Overall, while I didn't hate Quest for Infamy, I thought it was a disappointing misfire. Developer Infamous Quests copied way too much from Quest for Glory I -- right down to recreating its 20-year-old interface -- but they weren't able to reproduce the most important thing about the game: a funny and enjoyable script. So I'm a little mixed in my recommendation. Quest for Infamy takes about 20 hours to complete, it has reasonable quality, and it even has replay value, but it's also barely amusing and it's much cruder than you might expect (I saw it listed with a Teen ESRB rating on one site, but there's no way that can be right). So you could buy Quest for Infamy or not, depending on how much the premise intrigues you, and since it's a budget title, it probably wouldn't be your worst purchase of the year.
