Game Reviews

Tavern Quest

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Tavern Quest
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| Tavern Quest

Tavern Quest is the tale of a most unlikely chef.

The star of Glu's latest freemium concoction is a big purple monster. Rather than eating villagers, though, this ugly brute wants to feed them using his culinary skills.

It's a bit like the story of Antony Worrall Thomson, then, but minus the shoplifting.

Bye bye miss Ogre Pie

It's your task to help our ambitious-but-docile monster to fill and expand his humble restaurant. As the people stream in, you have to cook up a spread of weird and wonderful dishes, from Hydra Stew to Ogre Eye Pie.

Provided there's space to sit, your customers will settle and chow down on your food, paying up when satisfied.

You must use your funds to expand your restaurant, as well as to purchase more tables and chairs and cooking equipment. You'll also need to expand your service counter so that you can stock a decent variety of dishes.

Kitchen knight-mares

There's a second key element to Tavern Quest - battling.

Our mellow protagonist isn't the fighting sort, but he needs the money and special items one obtains from such dangerous quests. As such, you must attract, feed, and house heroes in order to get them to act in your behalf.

Each dish has a core ingredient that will appeal to a certain type of hero, whether it's a lemon-loving archer or a meat-craving knight. Once you've installed the noticeboard for a particular hero type, they'll stroll into your restaurant from time to time, hungry for a certain kind of food.

Serve this to them and you can either cash in for a good chunk of silver, or you can put them up in one of your rooms, which effectively enlists them in your own private army.

Food fight

Quests themselves can be embarked on any time, and are constantly updated. Once you have the three hero types necessary you can kick off the scrap.

These fights are simple affairs. You pick the order in which your heroes enter the battlefield, initiate special attacks, and fend off projectiles with screen taps, but most of the nitty gritty is handled for you.

It's not particularly involving, then, but Tavern Quest's fights are a nice diversion - especially when you're waiting for something to happen back in the restaurant.

Pleasantly full

Yes, Tavern Quest adopts a typical freemium structure. This means every activity that matters - from concocting a recipe to feeding a hero - takes a set amount of time, and only in-game currency (which can only be obtained in bulk with cold hard cash) can hurry this along.

Tavern Quest gets the balance between encouraging you to spend and offering enough free fun just about right. There's usually something for you to do that doesn't cost money, and - most importantly of all - the general task of running your restaurant is fun enough to make you want to splash out to improve things.

Tavern Quest also wins brownie points for creating an appealing, detailed world in which to spend your time and money. You'll want to spend a bit extra on that new dish because it looks damned cool.

It's this sense of fun, as well as a relative lack of arm-twisting to spend (if you don't mind checking-in infrequently), that a number of other freemium games could learn from.

Android version reviewed.

Tavern Quest

A bright, breezy, and charming freemium management game that offers plenty of fun tasks to keep you coming back for more
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.