Yesterday, Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff hit the iOS and Android stores.
For those of you that require some backstory, Family Guy is a television show from Fox created by Seth MacFarlane about a family of five: Peter, Lois, Chris, Meg, Stewie and Brian Griffin. The comedy show employs self-referential and ‘low brow’ humour, and has achieved a ridiculous amount of success.
Family Guy’s game has the same style as The Simpsons: Tapped Out, a very similar game on the appstores and consistently one of the top grossing.
The animated sequence at the beginning of Family Guy’s game is that the new president of Fox (which turns out to be the giant chicken that Peter has a violent history with) has cancelled Family Guy. Upon hearing this decision, Peter gets angry and his subsequent brawl with the chicken destroys the town. Your mission? Rebuild the town, unlock characters, complete quests and ultimately make your way to a completed Quahog.
Playing the game, I rather feel like The Simpsons has stolen their thunder. Tapped Out begins with self-reference, making jokes about games while being in the game – I rather feel like Family Guy wishes it could do the same thing, but cannot. Slowly, the Griffin family are realising something that South Park discovered long ago. Unlike South Park, however, Family Guy cannot quite make a good game out of their IP.
(One of these things is not like the other. Oh wait, yes it is.)
Because Tapped Out has already made its claim on the fourth-wall-breaking stage, The Quest For Stuff‘s humour is based around the show’s mythology; having to find unmentionable sex items for Glenn Quagmire, for example. Unfortunately, unlocking Chris, Quagmire, Bonnie and Jerome in the game is as far as I got, because I expected exactly the same issue I had with Tapped Out and was not disappointed: I hit the pay wall.
Timing the game, it took 10 minutes before I had a compulsory ‘mission’ to complete a microtransaction of £2.99 worth of Golden Clams. In 16 minutes 49 seconds, I had finally reached a point where I would have to wait another two hours before the quests I had undertaken would complete themselves and I would have new content.
As a result, along with every other pay-to-win sandboxes that dominate the appstores, the game was quickly uninstalled. I was left with nothing but a quarter of an hour of my life gone, and as much shame as one of the girls that Quagmire sleeps with – I hated that the game had taken that time from me, and had given me nothing back.
Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff is pure pornography. Beautiful to look at and incredibly enticing; but it will always give you a fake perception of what true sandbox games are really like, and are never as fun as the real thing with a game (or person) you truly care about.
