Review: The Quest for Freshness (Xbox Live Indie)
The Quest for Freshness is one of the entries into the Microsoft Old Spice Challenge. As such, it prominently features Old Spice and its products as part of the game. At it’s heart, Freshness is a tower defense game, but there’s a twist. The character you control on the screen can actually move around, not only to place the towers, but also to shoot bottles of Old Spice at the animals that are trying to destroy your “freshness extractor.”
It’s a great idea in theory, but the application is a bit off. The character moves so slow that it’s agonizing to try to travel from one part of the screen to the next, especially when trying to collect the coins dropped by enemies before they disappear.
Also, for a tower defense game, your towers are pretty useless. There are three types of towers (minigun, anti-air gun, and cannon) as well as a giant Old Spice bottle that will instantly destroy all the animals on the screen. The problem is that the towers aren’t upgradeable and are all pretty weak or just plain useless. The anti-air gun, naturally, only works on birds and won’t touch any of the other animals, which there are just more of. Likewise, the cannon cannot attack the birds, though it is great for widespread damage. Miniguns are all but useless, but still help a bit to weaken the animals until you can get over to them to throw your bottles.
There are six stages in total in two different locals: the island of Fiji and the Matterhorn. Each of the stages get more difficult, with the final two stages being near impossible because of the bears. Not only do they take a ton of damage to destroy, but they will take out your towers, leaving you scrambling to make up for the loss of fire power. Add to that the extremely fast-moving wolves and you’ll probably have to repeat the last few stages a few times before you finally beat them.
The game had a lot of potential and was pretty fun for the first half, but it really suffered from how slow the character moved. The story was laughable, but I suppose advertisement-based games don’t necessarily need a story to be “fun.” There also isn’t a way to save your progress, so if you want to stop, you’ll have to start from the first stage and work your way through them again.
Unless you’re a really big fan of Old Spice, you might be better off passing this one up.
The Tower Defense mini-game in 3D Dot Game Heroes has this same concept (tower defense but with a playable character that can also attack) but done good.