From the top of its few decades of existence, the young video game already has a few fossilized series in amber, which sometimes try to take over with more or less success, and to offer a second youth: the Pac-Man Championship Edition 2, or the evil Tetris Effect, which never ceases to transport us to unattainable spheres. Today, one of the very first representatives of the genre, the ancient Pong, plays the card of the fat come back.
It's so improbable that it can work , this is how your servant reacted to the announcement of PONG Quest, which at first sounds like an end-of-the-evening cocktail, DIY with the bottoms of hand bottles. However, old folks know this well: this kind of mixture can sometimes produce incredible results, or make you ever regret having thought about it. Take the ancestral principle of table tennis and its two removable bars that send back a pixelated ball until death follows, and transpose it into an RPG with pronounced rogue-lite accents, and you get PONG Quest.
How do you do fellow kids?
The adventure begins when it is up to you to personalize your iconic bar, just to give it a personality thanks to the many accessories that will continue to grow as the adventure progresses. Headphones on the ears and smile on the lips, our avatar is then immediately designated hero of the legend by a local crown head, which asks him to come after four modest thematic dungeons, in order to open a very mysterious door. After a brief gallop of history to assimilate the mechanics of this funny mix, we are now launched the assault on these dungeons from above, which borrow their extreme simplicity from the eponymous The Legend of Zelda.
Divided into four sub-sections, the latter do not show any crazy inventiveness, since the generic rooms of different sizes are randomly enchanted without really standing out, even if a few chests come to offer a meager booty to spend on various improvements. It will therefore be necessary to start at random in one direction to hope to fall on the transporter who will take you towards the next part, and so on until confronting a boss of the families in a devious combat, before leaving the assault of the next dungeon. It is therefore without digging the head that PONG Ques
In search of renewal
This is because the dungeons are full of enemies with increasingly high statistics, and it will be necessary to overcome them in Pong matches with more elaborate mechanics than the original. If the prospect of threading the same sequence by the dozen, the presence of items as varied as numerous makes it possible to quickly break the monotony, as soon as we manage to master their functioning, which is not gained from the start . It is all the more unfortunate that there was enough to do, since the selection offers beyond the expected fast balls or rebound well trat zombie balls which regenerate a little life or other spades to the different bosses to erect a real defense wall. But their limited number and twisted scrolling does not invite them to be used with as much pleasure as expected.
Despite this variety, the battles are enchanting and very similar, and the random structure of the dungeons which are sometimes too big for not much quickly gives way to monotony: the rooms follow each other and look alike, and since the shops rarely deign appear, we accumulate a money which we do not know what to do, just like the personalization items. The wobbly translation does not help to take advantage of the writing, however sympathetic, and we discover far too quickly that the NPCs bring absolutely nothing to the experience, and participate in an overly visible filling exercise. In the same order of idea, one wonders if the loss of a point of life each return of ball is not there to force grinder, and artificially increase the difficulty and the lifespan of a title which would have gained make it short.
