Beast Quest is a third person adventure game where you play as Tom, a destined hero who must hunt down four legendary beasts to save Avantia (the game world). Tom is guided by a wizard along a fairy linear path through four main areas. Tom must go through combat and platforming to reach his goal. The game is based on the Beast Quest books.

It’s probably fair to say that this is a children’s game as it’s based on children’s books, has some annoying child friendly voice acting and bright, round character models that would be more pleasing for a younger audience. Beast Master difficulty which was marked as the hardest was quite easy.

A standout part of this game is the combat system. Locking Tom into battle against up to four creatures, movement is heavily restricted meaning the player must use a good combination of dodges, blocking, light or heavy attacks, magic and different area attacks to defeat foes. Early on in the game the combat system feels a bit difficult as you try to get timings right but by the end just bashing the light attack button is enough as Tom is too powerful for anything to pose any sort of challenge. Along his journey Tom finds allies who can be called upon in battle, they strike once in an attack that’s powerful enough to one shot boss fights (which made them too easy). Boss fights are a little bland compared to their build up with only the first two being interesting, the first one was my first experience so having quick time events to finish was a bit of a shock and the second one brought in a dodging mechanic which was repeated four the fourth boss. There isn’t a lot of enemy variety as a few are introduced but get reskins a few times.

Tom gets an upgrade system that requires points for investment in skills. The skills are either a new magic attack or an increase to health, damage, crit chance and defence. Sadly there’s little customisation other than which spells are equipped with a choice of one item to boost a certain aspect of Tom’s power (two after getting a certain skill).

Beast Quest has plenty of side quests which mostly involve backtracking through the world to gather some junk for someone (basically fetch quests), the items for these quests didn’t appear without the quest being activated so the backtracking was forced and a bit irritating having to run through an area several times.

The are a few actual problems with this game. One that was noticeable was that occasionally I could see the seams in the environment along with some other minor graphical issues like floating rocks or slight movement on solid surfaces. There’s a glowing trail that can be activated to guide the player towards objectives which occasionally seemed to lose any idea of where it was going and had me running in circles, this combined with the lack of a decent labelled map system made some quests hard to find the way to complete. One of the achievements popped early too, suggesting that that’s a bit broken.

Overall, Beast Quest is a fairly standard adventure game. There’s a combat system that looks to be interesting before you outpower everything and a few minor issues but the way the character handles is janky which really doesn’t help with platforming as he won’t jump if you have any momentum and feels stiff in most cases. Ten years ago this game would have been average but it feels quite dated to play which is awful to say it only came out in twenty-eighteen. On the plus side I did have a nice relaxing time with it.