Lock’s Quest is an isometric view Tower defence strategy game where the main character (Lock) has to defend villages from an army of robots.

The first stage of each battle is building which you have limited time and resources when doing. There are a few different types of tower, a few traps and later soldiers to work with, as you may expect more can be unlocked as you go along. An annoying but clever thing about the game is that it progresses in stages, so building in an area will remain if you’re next battle is in the same area; you don’t build for one fight, you build for five, so any strategy and placement must really be thought ahead. The building is fairly decent in the game, however the camera angle can sometimes make placement awkward as you fight to put a gun where you want it.

As the towers are shooting at the robots Lock is able to walk around the battlefield using quick time events to fight enemies and repair towers, I liked this simple combat but it did get me killed more than once as I watched for the button prompts instead of the health bar. Although I did find that the towers in the game are rather weak, making me spend more time repairing than fighting.

Often in a tower defence game you are given a set number of enemies to kill in order to finish a wave, Lock’s Quest takes a different approach. Instead of battling until the enemies are all gone this game has you battle unlimited enemies until the timer ends, so it becomes a little bit like a survival game which I thought was an interesting change in the genre.

Mission types could vary as you could defend as normal or the game may tell you to attack the enemy or even both at once. Objectives could be basic defence, kill the boss, rescue the prisoners or kill specific enemies which gave it a decent variety. As a defender you may even be given multiple objectives to defend.

The things that put me off the game were that I could find no way to re-read instructions or tutorials; the music really annoyed me; there was a black load screen which sometimes made me think the game was broken; the developers had tried to make the world interesting so had given pointless NPC’s random bits of dialogue when it didn’t need to be there and the repair didn’t always seem to work properly.

Overall, when I played this game I was left with the feeling that it may have been better on a Nintendo DS than an Xbox One as it had text instead of voiced dialogue, the graphics were of a style I’d expect to find on DS as was the music and the way battles worked clicking and dragging would have probably made things flow a bit better. (I later searched on the internet and found that it was originally a DS game). Other than that I thought it was decent enough but a lot of patience is needed and there is a good amount of challenge with how quickly new enemies are introduced. It’s not one of my favourites in the genre but at a low enough price worth a go.

 

The art that I’m using as the featured image was found on the achievements section of the Xbox website. It shows the main character Lock stood holding some sort of wrench in front of a robot army which makes it look more like he’s leading them than destroying them. I don’t think it represents the game as well as it could.