Superbuu3 reviews: Costume Quest

Costume Quest is a game by Tim Schafer, the guy behind Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. This time he has tried his hand at a turn based RPG. Costume Quest is a very basic RPG that relies on its humour to keep you entertained. Thats not to say that the game is bad in anyway it is just very simple. Personally i enjoyed the game quite a lot.

The game is set on Halloween. You get to choose to play as either Reynold or Wren (this does not change gameplay whatsoever to my knowledge, just means your either a boy or a girl). I won't spoil the story but basically you are on a mission to get back candy and other less important stuff. The game uses a class based combat system in a very loose sense. This is because each class has only two attacks. You can modify your classes using battle stamps that you can earn throughout the game. I found collecting these as well as the other classes to be pretty intersting, and actually added a tactical element to the game. Its suprisingly easy to lose in this game, although there is no actual consequence of losing, as you just respawn and can reenter battle.

During combat you will end up having to press button prompts to make sure you land a critical hit. This is a decent method of keeping you involved in the game, i've played other basic RPGs where i kinda go into autopilot and just hammer basic attack, but this makes you pay attn. Especially as sometimes not landing that critical hit will cost you the battle. Enemies have basic classes to. Strangely I found the general fights (you always start fights yourself none of that random encounter crap) to be harder then the boss fights, as I don't think i died once during a boss fight.

The game has basic sidequests which generally reward you by building up your arsenal of classes, collecting battle stamps, or collecting candy (the games currency). There are three 'worlds' although personally i thought the first one was the best as its set in the suburbs, not that the others aren't as good. The graphics are cell shaded and look decent enough, and the visual style of the game works, I did actually enjoy how the battles were done visually as special moves look pretty cool. The dialogue in the game is decent and there's a good few jokes. There might be a slight grey area where some people won't appreciate the humour if they're not a child or an adult, as a lot of the jokes are its funny how kids think that or say those kinds of things, whereas children will literally agree with the kids in the game.

There's a demo up on the store so i'd suggest playing it, if it grabs your attention the full game is more of the same and deliver a few hours of fun. I don't think there's any real replay value unless you don't complete all the sidequests which i didn't have any difficulty completing. Completion time is probably about 4-6 hours, assuming you know what your doing in terms of RPGs, this isn't the kind of game where you can make yourself overpowered.

This was the best PSN game I've ever played. I had to beat the game in one sitting. I literally couldn't put it down. I went and bought the DLC for it since it was that good. I almost feel bad for getting that game for free.