Mobile – Many Welps

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot

August 19, 2019August 19, 2019Kluwes1 Comment

Sometimes I get this thought in my head that I’d really like to play a mobile game. This is usually followed by an hour of scrolling through the Google Play store, downloading things, trying them out, and remembering why I don’t play mobile games.

This weekend, as I was scrolling through the Play store I saw a familiar name. The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. I clicked on it to see who the developer was and sure enough, it was Ubisoft. You see, the Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, MQFEL from here on out, wasn’t always a mobile game. I believe it was even brought up in the Blaugust discord not too long ago.

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MQFEL Then

It was an ARPG with a unique twist. The castles and dungeons you raided were built by other players. You had your own castle and you set traps and monsters for others to fight to protect your own loot. It was a cool concept and I bought into it as soon as I heard about it. I believe this was the 3rd game I ever bought in Early Access. On February 5th, 2015,MQFEL was a free-to-play game with plenty of microtransactions. It was still an enjoyable experience though I really enjoyed the self-awareness of the dialog. Unfortunately, a little over a year later the Ubisoft ended all service for the game October 25th, 2016. I see this title in my Steam library every once and a while and reminisce about it. I’m sure there were problems with it but I honestly don’t remember what they might have been.

MQFEL Now:

It’s a fairly new mobile game released last month. It has all of the mobile game trappings: energy, chests you open with keys, autorun missions, even a battle pass type system. At its core, MQFEL a simple ARPG. You’re given 3 skills with various cooldowns and you tap to attack. Each castle has 2 stages, one where you run through a dungeon opening chests and fighting enemies, and one where you fight a large group of enemies or a boss all at once. There’s enough active gameplay there to make it feel like you’re playing a game which, in my experience, is not something I can say for a lot of mobile games I’ve tried. In fact, using the autorun feature will cause you to miss some chests in the first stage dungeons.Sadly, the castle building and rading feature is not in the mobile game as far as I can tell.

For a game called The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, there is surprisingly little loot. I’m getting maybe one or 2 pieces of gear from each castle. All of my upgrades thus far have come from the chests in the cash shop that requires keys. I guess the Mighty Quest for Chest Keys doesn’t have the same ring to it. There are other game modes, trials, that allow you to get materials to upgrade your gear after it reaches the max level. There’s a power rank that seems to be the determining factor for difficulty. As long as you’re above the rank the dungeon is easy.. It can still be done if you’re slightly below but you need to do a lot of dodging.

Right now it’s held my attention over the weekend. A lot of that was probably due to nostalgia for the old IP. But who knows, I’m enjoying my short time with it, I may keep it on my phone a little longer.

Siralim 2-PC/ Mobile Cross Saves

September 22, 2016September 22, 2016KluwesLeave a comment

A few weeks ago I picked up a game called Sirlaim 2. I had gotten the first Siralim during the steam summer sale and proceeded to play it for hours on end. It’s been described as a mix between Pokemon and Dragon Quest Monsters the latter which I have never played. Basically the premise of the game is you are a king (or queen) of the castle Siralim. Bad things are happening and you and have to save the kingdom. You do this by exploring randomized dungeons with a menagerie of monsters who you can catch out in the wild and train to progress. It’s kind of like one of those hero collector mobile games except you only pay once and can get all the content.

At its core Siralim and Siralim 2 are a dungeon crawler grindfests with no end. Monsters gain levels, weapons equipped to monsters gain levels, your castle can be upgraded, there is a lot of things to craft and a lot of materials to be farmed. The name of the game is progression for progressions sake and to see what how many types of team comps you can come up with. But the best feature of Siralim 2 is the PC/Mobile cross-save.

I bought Siralim 2 on steam for $15 and had no interest at first of getting the mobile version. After I few days I found myself wishing I could take it with me. So I went to the Google Play store and found that the mobile version was an additional $5. Best purchase I’ve made gaming wise in a long time and I’ve put more time into the mobile version than the PC. It’s such an easy game to pick up and play during some down time and when I want to play it longer I can export my save to the cloud and pick it back up on my computer.

I wish there were more of these especially for smaller indie games. Sure a lot of games have mobile ports or more commonly a lot of mobile games have PC ports and end up on Steam but this is the first time I’ve seen a game that has PC/Mobile cross save. It’s a feature I didn’t know I wanted as I don’t see my phone as a platform for gaming. There have only been a few other games The only other game I’ve really played on mobile was the port of Dragon Quest. But playing Siralim 2 on my phone has turned out out be at least as enjoyable as playing on the PC.

Pokemon Go: Adventures on Nature Island

July 12, 2016May 4, 2020KluwesLeave a comment

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I didn’t even know Pokemon Go was still coming out until I opened my Feedley a few days ago and saw all these posts about it. I immediately opened up my phone and downloaded the app, caught a squirtle 10 feet in front of me and continued on my day. I was on vacation all of last week and this particular day we decided to go walking in a county park.

For the most part it was a frustrating experience full of crashes and server messages. Until we walked to Nature Island. Now I don’t know about you, but to me Nature Island sounds like a prime Pokemon location. It almost sounds like a location from one of the games and besides being a beautiful hiking trail it was close enough to a cell tower that I could actually get to playing.

Playing I felt like my childhood dreams somewhat came true. I was walking around in the world searching for Pokemon and throwing pokeballs at them. My girlfriend found this all very amusing when I would stop and say “Hold on I got to get this one!” Her Snapchat story for the day was full of me yelling about Tangelas and Snorlaxes. There were also several unclaimed gyms, not being level 5 I couldn’t do anything about this though.

I only got to play the one day as I was visiting family and didn’t want to be staring at my phone the rest of vacation. So I closed out of it, put my phone back in my pocket and enjoyed the rest of my time.

When I got home I realized just how popular this game had become in such a short time. I also discovered there are about 20 pokestations a mile or less in any direction from my apartment and 4 gyms. As a result, my little town is crawling with people day and night looking at their phones and walking around. It’s great to see so many people interacting with one another and coming together because of Pokemon and a silly mobile game. I can’t wait to join them and hunt for more pokemon.

I was able to catch 4 pokemon on Nature Island before I lost reception.

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