New release: Dark Quest
Oh dear. Pocket Tactics reports on the release of Dark Quest, a turn-based fantasy dungeon crawler for Android, iPhone and iPad by Brain Seal Ltd.
The premise:
An evil sorcerer has appeared in the lands, he has built a dungeon in the nearby village of faladir, where his minions use it as a base to raid the surrounding villages to bring terror and death to all its citizens. A hero by the name Zantor dares to defy the powers of the sorcerer and seeks to destroy the dungeon and put an end to this.
Dark Quest’s title art bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the board game Hero Quest, from the scene composition to the logo, right down to the nearly identical pose of each game’s wizard. Compare:
Now, it’s been a long, long time since I played Hero Quest, and I haven’t played Dark Quest at all, so I don’t want to speculate on what other things Dark Quest might have borrowed–but in my opinion, the developers are practically begging for a lawsuit on the basis of that title art alone. (Amusingly, despite the fact that they changed the dwarf into an archer for their title art, the three playable character classes in Dark Quest are in fact “The Warrior,” “The Wizard” and “The Dwarf”; there is no archer class!)
Here is the trailer–those more familiar with Hero Quest than I might be able to divine more:
Dark Quest is currently being sold for £1.99 on the Apple App store and $0.99 on Google Play. I do not support cloning, and as such, I will not be providing a link to this game until I’m convinced that it went no further than aping Hero Quest’s title art. On the strength of user comments below, I’ve added in the links.
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On the plus side, it doesn’t look like they’ve ripped off HeroQuest scenarios wholesale, since the original had a rectangular board:
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/1600991/heroquest
upon which dungeon design was effected purely by the placement of doors and scenery.
On the negative side, the robed chap in the sky during the village part of that video reminded me an awful lot of the HQ GM screen… I guess it’s a fairly generic evil-sorcerer pose, though.
I wonder what Rodeo Games will make of this, given that they’re working on an iOS version of ‘Warhammer Quest’, the boardgame successor to ‘Hero Quest’
You “forget” to mention it’s out on Android also.
Oh! I don’t know how I missed that. I’ll update the story.
i tried the game… it’s not a rip-off of hero quest, but a completely different game
Absolutely they ripped it from HeroQuest. No question about it. Howevcer that is what makes this the greatest fantasy game app out on the market.