Vital Stats

Genre: Strategy
Players: 1-2. Multiplayer needs two copies of the game, though.
Online: Local Wi-Fi

Developer: 5th Cell
Publisher: THQ
ESRB Rating: E
Release Date: 9/8/08

Platforms

• DS

Blizzard’s success with games bearing the suffix “-craft” has had some unintended consequences outside the occasional dead man in an internet cafe. Among them is the onset of genre myopia. Take strategy as an example: list off all the strategy games you can think of off the top of your head. You certainly listed off Warcraft and Starcraft, but how far down the list did you get before you reached a tower defense game? Blizzard’s runaway success redefined not only what strategy games are, but what they can be. So you mightn’t necessarily think of other takes on the genre like Dyson, Pikmin, or 5th Cell’s most recent title, Lock’s Quest. Here’s what it is and why you should.

Typical tower defense games alternate between two main phases. There’s the actual game where you build your defenses, which is followed by an automatic section where the enemy onslaught tries to overwhelm them. The trait that really distinguishes Lock’s Quest is that it tries to cut the “wait” out of “hurry up and wait.” Your engineering avatar Lock is actually on the battlefield with the defenses you’ve built, and he can repair the damage they suffer or engage the enemy for a little preventative maintenance.

We meet again, isometric grid.
Only this time,
I will be victorious

The tower building works extremely well; this is the sort of thing that touch controls were made for. The game plays out on an isometric grid, a sort of 2.5D array of tiles where you fake depth by presenting the world at a 45° angle. Navigating around this kind of space with a directional pad is irksome, but Lock’s Quest frees you from that chore by letting you drag and drop your fortifications. Your walls and turrets snap to the nearest grid tile and automatically align with adjacent defenses, so you can build just about as fast as you can plan.

It’s nice to see a strategy game that reduces barriers to entry, but the real advantage to the touch interface is it makes the strategic gameplay more intense. You get about three minutes to fortify your position between waves, and just enough resources to pull it off at the higher difficulty levels. Three minutes isn’t much time to sight-read a level, but it’s just enough because game’s controls don’t get in the way.

Lock’s Quest is about more than building and maintaining walls, though. The game takes place across 100 days with one battle per day, but some of these battles are consecutive and rely on the same pool of resources from day to day. Keeping your defenses both light and durable will leave you with a building surplus on subsequent days when the fights are harder. You can also place traps and helpers, which cripple your adversaries and shore up your walls, respectively. There’s a lot to balance as you prepare for the enemy at your gates, but the tight building interface means that your success is determined by your brain and not your hands.

Combat looks more complex than it is.
Your automatic defenses manage
most of this clutter.

It’s a shame then that the combat phase doesn’t work so well. Lock is controlled by tapping the touch screen: tap anywhere or on anything, and Lock will run over and make a context sensitive judgment about what to do. Pathfinding rears its ugly head enroute though, and Lock hangs up on corners and sticks to intervining enemies. This isn’t a deal breaker at the normal difficulty level, but becomes frustrating in hard mode where the five seconds you spend disentangling Lock are the difference between a standing wall and a pile of rubble.

Sketchy controls aside, the combat is far more engaging than typical tower defense. Reinforcing walls and slaying enemies is accompanied by quick time events, like tapping numbered buttons in the correct order or spinning a gear. It’s fashionable in games criticism to hate quick time events, but Lock’s Quest proves that they can be used well in the right context. In this case, the quick time events offer a visceral action break to the otherwise cerebral gameplay without compromising the game’s pacing. Regardless, haters should know that the events aren’t mandatory, and instead provide you with a handy performance boost.

There are certainly flaws in the gameplay for Lock’s Quest, but the amalgam is hardly a waste of code. Instead, the game’s 100 levels make for an extensive exploration of tower defense concepts with increasingly demanding gameplay that doesn’t scrimp on depth. It can become stale during long play stints, but is well suited to portable play. It’s a pity that there’s not a lot of replay value outside hard mode, but the game’s scale is such that you won’t feel cheated.

Special boy with mysterious past…check.
Hometown burnt to the ground…check.
Ridiculous villain name…double check.

The weak link in Lock’s Quest is instead the tepid interstitial story that fills up the gaps between combats. Lock lives in a world intermittently besieged by aggressive robots that can be slaughtered wholesale without giving up that precious ESRB rating. The narrative explores where these Clockworks came from, why Lock is special and has to fight them, how he can save his kidnapped little sister, and a smattering of other worn pages from the big book of RPG clichés. Some of these interstitials involve exploring towns where you’ll find a handful of NPCs with interesting and entertaining dialog, but the RPG elements are about 90% padding by volume. The storytelling isn’t bad as video games go, but that’s more a comment on the narrative poverty of the industry than a recommendation. Thankfully, it’s mostly skippable, though the lengthy movies aren’t, and skipping the story may leave you lost as you hunt for your next objective.

As lackluster as the story is, it’s presented well. The combat graphics may be cartoony emissaries from the SNES era, but dialog is accompanied by rich character portraits with a wide array of emotions. The art style leans toward the fey, which is wholly appropriate given the anime-inspired RPG narrative, so it both looks good and fits well. Better still, the narrative interludes break up the combat intensity, which makes the pacing more palatable.

Lock’s Quest is something of a mixed bag that makes it a game only a genre fan could love. Hardcore players will be turned off by the humdrum story and repetitious character of the gameplay, and the length and time investment to pick up the rules will be a deal breaker for casual gamers. However, strategy fans will find a lovingly crafted tower defense game that overcomes its flaws to offer a thorough exploration of the genre.

What It Costs: $20

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $20(play)
•To The Genre Fan: $25(buy)
•To The Casual: $15(play)