The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
SwapQuest
SwapQuest ($2.99) originally piqued my interest more than a year ago, back in February of 2014 not long after it was initially announced. We’re big fans of genre mashups around here, and SwapQuest’s was one that sounded especially clever and unique. Basically, take the tile-swapping-and-connecting of the classic Pipe Dream/Pipe Mania and add a whole RPG adventure built around it. Your little hero in SwapQuest is constantly moving and needs to travel a path upwards towards a goal. You accomplish this by swapping various types of tiles around to create a continuous path, picking up treasures and fighting baddies along the way.
It’s a simple idea but SwapQuest itself is anything but simple. While your character moves on its own you do have the power to stop them in their tracks and even change their direction. Whereas Pipe Mania has that constant threat of a timer ticking down, SwapQuest is a lot more relaxed in terms of it letting your sort out your strategy and swap pipes around. You can’t take all the time in the world, as there is an evil black cloud chasing you from the bottom of the screen, but it moves very slowly and so you have many opportunities to visit different points on each map and try to collect as many treasures and fight as many enemies as you can.
Together with some moderate upgrading options and a very interesting story, not to mention some of the most fantastic pixel art and animation I’ve seen in some time, and SwapQuest just comes together beautifully. If I had one complaint it would be that your character moves a bit too slowly, so the time it takes to work through a whole level is just a bit longer than you might want it to be while, say, waiting at a stoplight or something. It’s a minor gripe though, and in the grand scheme of things SwapQuest is the type of high-quality and entertaining effort you don’t always see in the mobile space. Definitely check out more impressions in our forums, but if you like the general idea of SwapQuest, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed dropping a few bucks on this gem.
