Ragar loots keeps (and gets his own looted) in Ubisoft's new F2P dungeon crawler/manager

Bosses, a.k.a. I Hate Count Snottingham So Much

While you're making your way through the tutorial keeps and the various NPC keeps available afterward, TMQEL starts to introduce new monsters and traps into the mix. Things start out simple at first with basic melee and ranged monsters, then a healer and a Cyclops for a heavy hitter. At the end of the tutorial you'll meet your first boss monster, Count Snottingham. Essentially he's one of those Snotters, but he's gigantic, has a spread shot on that basic attack, and he has a long bomb shot that puts caustic acid on the ground. This is the first difficult fight you're going to see in the game, particularly as ranged since his cooldown on attacks seems to be about the same time it takes me to fire off a basic attack or a spell. The Warrior had an easier time with that fight, but it was still painful at level 4. Once he finally goes down, you might start thinking to yourself, "Boy, glad I don't have to see him all that often!" Unfortunately you're going to be seeing more of Big, Green and Ugly - a lot more.

Back at your keep, if you look at your Summoning Portal, you can see the various monsters available to you as you upgrade the portal further. Many of them are monsters that you would expect but, mixed in with those, are boss monsters from the NPC keeps, like our friend Count Snottingham. When stocking your keep with monsters and traps to defend your riches, you can throw bosses at your foes to keep their mitts off your treasure. Unfortunately this cuts both ways. You'd better get used to fighting boss monsters over and over again because nearly every keep you find will be stocked with plenty of them. Picture fighting Snottingham with Glue Minefields slowing you down or Dr. Skull chain-summoning skeletons to fight on top of a flame-spewing Rotating Cannon. Sure you can reposition the bosses to a more favorable area, but time spent moving the boss is time that's not spent killing the boss and the clock for those treasure chests is always ticking. Of course when you're fresh out of the tutorial, you're probably not setting your sights on those higher level keeps full of bosses and greater treasure, right? There's gear to upgrade and skills to learn first, so you have to start small. "I'm level 5 now and a bunch of these starting keeps say they're level 5, so that must mean it's an even fight, right?" That level number next to the keep? Not particularly helpful.

When you click on a keep in the Region Map, you'll see the level near the top but that's not the important information here. The key pieces of information in that list are the number of traps, the Defense Rating (how many monsters are inside), how long a typical clearing of the keep takes, and how many heroes have died trying to loot that keep. You might see two level 5 or 6 keeps next to each other on the Region Map and think they're the same difficulty, but a closer inspection will show that one has only 50 of its 75 Defense Rating utilized and only two kills while the second has 115/115 and a kill count in the high 50s. Even the keeps with identical monster counts can vary wildly in difficulty if one is stocked with filler monsters while the other is a brutal gauntlet of boss monsters and glue traps designed to destroy timers and steal Crowns (a numerical indicator of how good you are at raiding keeps and protecting your own) from would-be invaders. Unless you're careful and grind some before moving up to the next tier (or just really lucky with loot drops), be prepared to die quite a bit while dungeon raiding. Your fellow players don't like handing out free gold and they actually get gold when their defenses kill you, so they'll use every dirty trick in the book to take you out.

Conclusion

Starting out in The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, be prepared to spend some time raiding the NPC keeps to gear out and level up early on. You can try your luck raiding your neighbors, but if you're not careful (or just plain unlucky) you may get thrown into a battle you can't potion your way out of. Sure you can spend 100 gold to resurrect in place and keep your progress/items for that run, but early in the game 100 gold is a lot of money and your time is better spent raiding more consistent dungeons until you have a better set of skills and gear to dive into actual raiding.

As for the game itself, I believe Ubisoft has developed a F2P game with some potential. The action RPG mechanics feel very solid while raiding keeps and the dungeon keeper mechanics of laying out traps and monsters has a fair amount of depth to it. Some balancing still needs to be done and I really wish the camera could be rotated, but the core of the game is well made. The main issue I have with the game is that presentation of keep information I mentioned earlier. I've lost count of the number of times I've raided a keep that looked like it was my level only to find it was filled with Snottinghams, Dr. Skulls, and various other extremely nasty beasts my keep was multiple upgrades and piles of cash away from being able to summon. This won't be as much of an issue as players get to level cap and the playing field has leveled out, but new players stand to get extremely frustrated when more than half of the keeps they raid are a wall of bosses they can't kill in time.

The other issue I have with the game stems from the Shield that protects a keep’s treasure from being looted more than every few hours. In the beta right now, it's not a major issue; it’s about a 50/50 split between keeps with shielded stashes and those that are ripe for the looting. During the Open House, however, I was able to loot only one keep the entire time I played because every other keep was already ransacked. My own keep lasted barely five minutes before the ravenous hordes at the gate beat down my paltry level five defenses. If keeps went down that quickly during the Open House, what happens when we go into Open Beta or launch and there’re thousands upon thousands of players looking for treasure to steal? The game's certainly playable without raiding other players (you can still level up, get gear, improve your keep, etc.), but the bulk of the fun is in attacking your fellow players and it's significantly better income doing that as well.

I'm hopeful that Ubisoft can address these issues before launch and I'm looking forward to playing more of the game and improving my castle's defenses. I'd also like to start having better luck with raiding those keeps filled to the brim with bosses, but that's going to require the game to stop being stingy and drop me an upgrade for the level 3 weapon my beta key came with. So many armor drops, so few swords and staves...

Michael "Ragar" Branham