Let's Talk About Pong Quest

You ever notice how game developers are trying to combine any genre with an RPG. Think about it, we've had action RPG's, sports RPG's, puzzle RPG's, platforming RPG's even first-person shoter RPG's. I guess I understand why, RPG's are becoming more popular, but a lot of the time they're adding RPG elements to games that clearly didn't need them, often with disastrous results, looking directly at you Wolfenstein Youngblood. And thus we have today's subject, Pong Quest which mixes RPG's with, Pong? Yeah Pong, one of the oldest and simplest games ever made. How do you turn that into an RPG? Well let's find out.

You ever notice how game developers are trying to combine any genre with an RPG. Think about it, we've had action RPG's, sports RPG's, puzzle RPG's, platforming RPG's even first-person shooter RPG's. I guess I understand why, RPG's are becoming more popular, but a lot of the time they're adding RPG elements to games that clearly didn't need them, often with disastrous results, looking directly at you Wolfenstein Youngblood. And thus we have today's subject, Pong Quest which mixes RPG's with, Pong? Yeah Pong, one of the oldest and simplest games ever made. How do you turn that into an RPG? Well let's find out.

When you start the game off you'll notice that there are several different modes of play. There's the single player Quest mode and several multiplayer modes including classic Pong and online. Unfortunately I was unable to test any of the multiplayer modes due to, well you probably know why, and I wasn't able to find anyone playing this online so I'm looking at this strictly based on the single player. The story is as simple as it gets, you're tasked by the King of Pong to find 4 magic orbs so he can open a door. No, really, that's the entire plot. I wasn't expecting much from the plot of a Pong game and yet I'm still somehow disappointed. The game doesn't take itself seriously at all and the whole thing is played very tongue and cheek but very few of the jokes actually land and there's a distinct lack of any real charm. Paper Mario this is not.

The basic gameplay is that of a dungeon crawler. You're dropped into a randomly generated dungeon and have to make your way to an exit. Each of the five dungeons have 4 stages with the fourth capped off with a boss fight. As you explore you'll run into enemies that have to be defeated in a Pong battle after which you'll gain experience and level up. So far it doesn't sound that bad, Right? It might be super simplistic but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. However, when you get down to the details, Pong Quest begins to fall apart.

Let's start with the dungeons. Every dungeon in Pong Quest is exactly the same. Sure the layouts are different but they don't offer any unique puzzles or obstacles. The forest dungeon is the same as the ice dungeon and vice versa. Outside of having different enemies that fit each theme, none of the dungeons feel like they take advantage of the different level themes in any significant way. None of the dungeons get any harder either. The later dungeons are only “harder” because they are longer but that only makes them more tedious to complete. There's no real reason to explore these dungeons either because all you'll find are treasure chests which contain items you won't need, shops that sell items you won't need or minigames. The minigames are extremely basic and they're all the same in every dungeon, they're not even worth doing either since they don't offer any unique rewards outside of costume pieces. The only exception are the vortex's which take you to a unique minigame depending on what dungeon you're in, some of which are based on other Atari game like Asteroid and Centipede. Unfortunately, these vortex minigames are fucking awful. It never feels like you have any real control and whenever you win, it only feels like you won by sheer luck. Oh and if you fail, you lose money and items. Just avoid them, they are not worth the effort.

Pong Quest does at least attempt to entice players to explore by having special missions in each dungeon but like everything else, they're the same in every dungeon with no variation. On the first level you have to beat every enemy, second level you have to avoid enemies and the third is explore every room. At first they aren't too bad but when the dungeons get bigger they become tiring to complete and I just ignored them after a while. They don't even offer much for doing them, the only substatial reward you get are costume pieces which are purely cosmetic. And those costume pieces are the only real customisation the game offers.

I believe that there are three core aspects you must nail to make a good RPG, exploration, combat and customisation. Well Pong Quest has botched two of them so far but let's see how it handles combat. When you engage an enemy the game switches to a game of Pong. I don't think I need to explain what Pong is because it's one of the most famous games out there. Everyone has played it at least once. So rather than explain the basics of the most basic game ever created I will instead talk about what Pong Quest adds to the Pong formula. For starters the game is not score based, instead both you and your opponent have health bars. You'll lose a little health by bouncing the ball back and lose more when the ball enters your own goal and vice versa for your opponent. You'll want to get the ball in the opponents goal, obviously, but it's surprisingly hard to do because the AI is shockingly good at knowing where the ball is going to be. Unless they were very slow I rarely got the ball in the goal to do damage. You do have to score a goal to finish the opponent off but the only consistent way I found to do that was to lower the opponents health to critical levels which slows them down. The basically wittles most battles down to a war of attrition rather than a game of skill.

That's not to say you don't have any tools to help you out. Granted you have no moves other than move up and down, why there isn't a speed up option is baffling to me but whatever, but you do have different types of balls that can help you out. You can get these from treasure chests, shops and defeated enemies so you have plenty of oportunities to stock up. There's quite a number of them but at the end of the day you'll only really use about 5 of them the most prominent being potion balls because they can heal you which you need to do a lot. It's for this reason that I never upgraded my inventory any higher than 5 and also because actually using them is a pain in the ass. You see, in order to use a ball you need to scroll through a menu and select it in the middle of a game, making it harder to focus on the game. But wait, it gets better, you can't just de-select the item when you don't want to use it anymore, that would make too much fucking sense, no you have to scroll through the menu again and select the normal ball. How is this so awkward? You have 4 face buttons that could be used as a de-select button. Use one of them for fucks sake! That's the thing with Pong Quest, it's not that the game is bad, it's that it's lazy. A lot of it's problems have easy fixes but the designers were either too lazy or incompetent to come up with any of them.

OK I've been complaining a lot so let's try to find a positive. Ummm... at least it has decent enemy variety? They all use different balls and will drop different balls, ha dropping balls, but once they actually run out of balls the battle turns into a standard game of Pong. The worst enemies are the ones who use balls that change the playing field. It just makes the game more chaotic and not in a fun and interesting way either. And guess what every boss in this game does. Look I didn't expect much from the bosses but I expected them to feel like actual bosses, not just regular enemies with more health and more annoying balls. The funny thing is despite all this new stuff added, it never adds any real depth. It's still Pong, it's still super simplistic and doing it over and over again gets boring. I actually started to avoid battles and exploring dungeons because I wasn't having any fun. Avoiding enemies is actually a lot harder than you might think due to how inconsistent the AI is. One moment the enemy is blinder than Hellen Keller in a dark room and the next they are nigh omnipotent. You may be asking why I would run from enemies and not battle them to level-up and the answer to that is because most of the upgrades you get from leveling up are worthless. The only upgrades that felt like they did something were health increases, inventory increases and upgrades to the map. Once I got the map upgraded to the point I could see the exit I made a beeline straight for it. The only time I ever explored the dungeons was when I needed to find a boss key. This game was so boring I went out of my way to finish it as fast as possible.

Every thing about Pong Quest feels weak and lazy. The gameplay lacks depth and originality, the dungeon design is banal and even visually the game is boring to look at. I get that they didn't have much to work with seeing as it's fucking Pong, but this game is basic to a fault. There is nothing here that I can recommend to you as there are far better options out there. If you want to play Pong I'm sure you can find a free version online, it's Pong for Christ sake, but if you want something with actual depth and replay value then look elsewhere. Maybe it's better with multiplayer but as a single player game this is a definite pass. Until next time, remember to stay safe and have fun.