Munchkin: Quacked Quest (Xbox One)

Munchkin is my favorite card game of all time, although that is mostly because I made a custom version with Legend of Zelda elements that caught on better with the people I wanted to play it with. Still, there was a lot I enjoyed about the original game by Steve Jackson and I often wondered what form it could take if it was ever adapted into a video game. When I saw Munchkin: Quacked Quest was set for release, I waited with great curiosity, but I certainly didn’t expect the form the game would end up taking.

 

Munchkin: Quacked Quest is a competitive multiplayer game where up to four people will enter a dungeon together and compete to level up their characters either by defeating monsters or completing the objectives found on different floors. Players get to set the time they’ll spend exploring these randomly generated dungeons before they are thrown into a boss battle to wrap things up, the game rewarding bonus levels for randomly picked parameters none of the users could know going in. These are usually tied to activities that should be reasonably rewarded like killing the most monsters or collecting the most gold while others are meant to help with closing the level gap like rewarding the player with the most deaths. There is very little reason to cooperate with your opponents, especially when some conditions for extra levels are things like landing the last hit on a boss or dealing the most damage, and there are ways to actively sabotage each other like tackling each other for brief stuns or deliberately triggering dungeon traps to damage them.

Much of this is a good attempt to translate Munchkin into a video game, some party game elements tossed in to allow for players of different skill levels to be on an almost even level. However, to simulate the deck from the card game, the dungeons the players plunge into are derived from a set of randomly drawn cards. These cards will influence the dungeon floor layouts, the types of enemies fought, the weapons available, and the boss fought at the end. The deck has a surprisingly shallow pool of options, this not too bad for things like the weapons where a decent variety is much more fun than when the game focuses these down to just one type, but others like the boss pool are incredibly small, the game just introducing new goals to the same four boss fights. You have no influence over which cards are picked when you plunge into the dungeon together, meaning you can get stuck with overly familiar cards or boring ones, and since the game makes unlocking new cards the reward for finishing a full run of Munchkin: Quacked Quest, the process of expanding the available options is tedious in itself.

 

Once you are in the dungeon, there are quite a few problems with how the game is designed in general. Players have three options for attack beyond their non-damaging tackle. You have your main weapon, and while the game boasts of silly options like a chainsaw in this mostly medieval fantasy-focused game, most of these play pretty similarly. Some weapons may mean you have a range or power advantage with your strikes, but they are all meant to be swung wildly at what’s in front of you, making them feel like they’re essentially the same. Your secondary weapon has more variety, starting off as a shield that can defend from enemy attacks but you can find weapons in chests like guns or magical wands. Sacrificing defense in this game can burn you since the game loves enemy swarms and you lose a lot of gold that goes towards leveling up on a death, but there are rare cases where having a long range weapon can keep you out of trouble like in the Plutonium Dragon boss fight. Most fights are about swinging your main weapon mindlessly, but in the dungeons you can find different class hats. Swapping to a wizard, cleric, thief, or warrior gives you a special class ability. A thief can hide so the monsters focus on other players and the wizard can make a protective bubble to relieve pressure, but these don’t spice up combat enough. Similarly, you can swap your race as well, but this just impacts stat distribution. The human middle ground doesn’t feel too different from the slightly stronger or slightly sturdier orc and dwarf, the elf feeling the most distinct because it dies more quickly. All in all, your weapon and ability options aren’t that great, and most of what you find in treasure chests are best sold to funnel into your level growth instead of injecting a new form of play into the affair.

The dungeon floors in Munchkin: Quacked Quest are almost just as important as the enemies you face, mainly because the goals in them often require navigating around traps or opening sealed passages to get to whatever your goal is. For the most part, the goal of a floor is to either collect ducks or defeat enemies with levels rewarded to whoever does it best, the option to move to the next floor only available once every duck or baddie has been dealt with. To its credit there are plenty of different hazards like hot coals, ice, and deadly pits, the game makes some good use of walls to funnel you into enemy groups, and some areas actually reward you if you die and become a ghost since you can take a shortcut through certain walls before your revival automatically kicks in. Enemies mostly rely on bum rush maneuvers or long range options, and while there are few types like the tough trolls, the abundant mice and chickens, and plants that fire in multiple directions, you mostly will be dealing with countless skeletons wielding different weapons in ways that don’t feel too distinct.

 

Your first time doing a dungeon run might be enjoyable in Munchkin: Quacked Quest, but only if you set the timer very low. Even though the game tries to randomize layouts, its quite clear it only has a few pre-built ones, and while it can do things like populate the floors with more destructible furniture if you get the card that clutters the dungeon, it is incredibly likely you’ll encounter identical floors when doing a run as short as five minutes long so long as the group is moving at even just a steady pace. The similarity of the goals, floors, and weapons really begin to show when you’re retreading the same rooms in a single run, and on top of all of this is an announcer who tries to add silly commentary to it all but has an exceptionally limited pool of responses to actions you will do repeatedly. He does have his moments before he very quickly starts rehashing his material, a particular highlight occurring if you dilly-dally on a floor too long. After completing the room’s goal the timer stops and you are meant to move on, but if you linger a while, the narrator will begin to read an entire passage from The Odyssey to pass the time. You can disable him, but in a game that seems to want to rely on humor, it makes the game feel very empty and dry without his recycled reactions.

 

Then we have annoying technical issues on top of it all. In a local multiplayer game the screen will not scroll properly, and since characters aren’t allowed to leave the screen, they’ll be locked in if they’re pressing against the border. In some rooms one player will arbitrarily control the camera’s movement, able to navigate in a way that prevents the other players from acquiring items or even traps them in repeated death loops as they’re pressed between a wall, the screen, and a trap. You are meant to work against each other and your usual methods involve just the tackle or snagging items before they do, but this is unintentional and sometimes impossible for the losing player to circumvent if they are screwed over by this programming problem. Even if you do cooperate and move against the screen borders together, the game only moves the screen as it sees fit, making it easy to hit danger you couldn’t see off-screen. Sometimes the item pick-ups have issues as well, their information not displaying or the window explaining them showing up somewhere else on the screen or even only being visible if the camera is in the right spot.

 

The biggest technical problem has to come from the bots though. If you are either playing on your own or with an incomplete group, you can enable AI controlled opponents to fill out the remaining slots in your band of four. The robotic characters are incredibly dumb though. They will try and complete objectives usually and can even get a bit competitive in tackling other players, but they seem designed to be easily overcome when they’re not outright failing to understand the level geometry. They won’t cause any issues with screen scrolling, but even with the minimal degree of randomness featured, the robots can sometimes constantly charge into a group of enemies they don’t realize is there, dying and repeating the process until you mercifully free them from their torment.  They might be baffled by hazards or wall layouts, to the point I witnessed three bots constantly walk over the same spiked traps in a maze that could be easily navigated safely but their minds just got stuck on repeating the same back and forth movements that got them nowhere. They sometimes might not even detect where the last duck is or won’t attack the last enemy to clear the floor, and I mostly learned about their idiocy because I was trying to unlock new cards by having them try to complete levels while I stood by and watched. They aren’t much smarter if you are involved so its not AI adapting to the perceived skill level of the player, but perhaps even more hilariously bad is the fact I did a whole dungeon run without doing anything until the boss. The bots had done all the room goals and fighting and entered the boss fight with multiple levels while I was still level 1, but I was able to earn more levels than all of them just by participating in the fight naturally. All bosses summon tons of little enemies as support who quickly gave me the gold needed to level up, the boss provided some levels as well, and even before bonus levels were totaled at the end I had won. Essentially there is no reason to play this game single-player because of their awful AI, and sadly, bringing other players along will just expose them to the repetition and poor design rampant throughout the experience.

THE VERDICT: Even ignoring the poor adaptation of the looting, equipping, and sabotage elements of the Munchkin card game, Asmodee Digital’s Munchkin: Quacked Quest is just a badly designed and repetitious multiplayer game all around. Somehow all the random modifiers don’t alleviate the constant recycling of floor layouts and the four bosses, and your options for dealing with them never feel distinct no matter what weapons you find or class you’re using. Despite trying to be silly, most of the humor in the game will be baffled responses to technical glitches rather than the quickly exhausted narrator commentary, the gameplay even having the potential to grow trite and tiresome before your first dungeon run is complete.

 

And so, I give Munchkin: Quacked Quest for Xbox One…

A TERRIBLE rating. For those I play the card game with, it is routinely requested we play any time we meet up. For Munchkin: Quacked Quest, we were already feeling like we wanted to be done before a five minute dungeon was complete. The core elements, such as the goals and combat, are incredibly shallow and not pushed in any interesting direction, and while the room layouts did have potential because they had a varied influence on the fights and approaches required to make progress towards your goals, you’ll too rapidly see them again, the game slipping into a boring cycle of the same experiences. The random elements are tied either to treasure chest contents that lose their luster when their lack of variety is made clear or the end-of-game bonus levels that don’t do enough to really incentivize interesting play. The card system has interesting ideas but its randomness and pool of options aren’t integrated well enough into the experience to make different runs feel distinct, and some of their differences are barely felt at all just like the race-specific stats. Competing with other players isn’t all that interesting when everyone starts to recognize the optimal way to complete a floor, and the bots are sadly the most effective bit of comedy in the game since they are so ineffective.

 

The Munchkin card game parodies Dungeons and Dragons and its systems, but Munchkin: Quacked Quest feels like it is an ineffective parody of Munchkin. Mild sabotage, bland equipment variety, weak combat, and uninteresting randomization come together into a game that somehow feels less varied than the card game when that only has a single deck of cards to work with. I think there is hope for a better Munchkin game in different hands, but this title is a dull multiplayer dungeon crawler whose shallowness would make it ineffective even if it was divorced from the recognizable brand it is tarnishing.