TLDR: Game is a decent dungeon-maker / dungeon-raider, but is highly Pay-to-Win; be prepared to grind countless hours if you don't want to use the real-money cash shop for "boosts", "item packs", or just outright buy the good defenses from Steam Market. Also Ubisoft DRM (U-play) sucks!

Has lots of potential to be a great game but sadly won't live up to it's potential due to developers focusing more on Pay-to-Win content instead of balance.

This game had been in closed beta for almost a year and had a major rework due to backlash and criticisms over their shoddy mobile-games-style "pay-dollars-to-not-wait-X-hours" business model. Amazingly, it took them almost a year before they realized their business model ain't working for a PC game - despite the constant complaints and whines of the players.

Game got rework and released open beta on Febuary, 2014. It was buggy and unbalanced, but that was expected for a game that was on beta. What's not to be expected though, is for devs to start shoving DLC, advertisments for other ubisoft games, and locking characters behind a paywall - when the game is supposed to be testing for bugs and balance. Isn't the whole point of a beta to flesh-out the kinks of the game? Not "try to milk as much money from your players before the game even gets a full release".

My major complaint about this game is the terrible pace of balance fixes. Patches usually come in a bi-monthly basis. People have listed problems with the game's balance ever since the start of the open beta - problems that made the game repetitive, stale, and boring. The devs even acknowledged these problems themselves even as early as March - yet they barely touched the balance when it comes to patches; it's usually 1 minor balance change followed by more DLC, content disguised to entice you to spend money on blings (pets, costumes, crafting patch), or more advertisements.

The slow pace of balance changes results in "flavor-of-the-month" setups where people will just resort to the most imbalanced setups that's currently available. This is what makes the game a repetitive and boring choir, as 90% of the time, you'll find people are just using the same setups with little variations in their defences. This trend had been going on for over a year - and looking at how the devs are more content to shove DLC on your face than listening to players' feedback - then this game ain't going anywhere.

Update: (August 2014 - Crafting patch)
The crafting patch has turned the game into Pay-to-Win, again!.. This patch introduced crafting rare monsters and equipment by collecting rare materials - these materials are so rare that most players who don't spend money on the cash shop will only be able to craft very few rare monsters and equipment; those who use the cash shop have a clear advantage over those who don't.

Update: (October 2014 - Release)
Game got released and it's still Pay-to-Win; I tried attacking castles but those who have tons of rare monsters seem impossible for me to win against. Meanwhile, my castle with only a few rare monsters get rolled over by other players.

Update (December 5, 2014 - Added the ability to buy and sell items on the Steam Market)
Game is blatantly pay-to-win as you can now buy and sell casle defenses on Steam Market. If you have a disposable income and you're looking for a shallow game where you can just buy your way to the top of the leaderboards using Steam Market then this game is for you!

This game was fun but the past few months its more pay to win than ever. Unless you grind like there is no tomorrow you can't build the traps. The old ones you had already spent time and money on they put as diseased and are basically depowered trash. And now there are special double/triple traps or monsters to make. but they need so many epic parts that you need to buy loot bags for a chance at an item...of which you will need 3 or 4 to make. The game was fun. even with the people with glitching and trap castles. now its just pointless if you want to go in and do anything. It is still fun if you want to log in and take on a castle. Maybe you will find a fun one. Usually not. Now a days its spring trap into enraged juiced baddies or so many bought creatures that its unwinnable. Recently what finally did it was another mage nerf to make his key spell faster but now it does no damage. What was a fun cute game quickly turned into who can spend the most cash. Ah well on to the next game in the vast steam libary.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a game with an interesting and promising design format that ultimately falls short of it's potential.

In Mighty Quest (I'll call it Mighty Quest for the rest of the review because ♥♥♥♥ if I'm gonna type out the whole title every time I need to refer to it) you play as a citizen of the nation of Opulencia: a realm comprised entirely of super-wealthy elites who have built magical sky castles to escape the hum-drum woes of the ground dwellers. But how, you may ask, did the Opulencians acquire such wealth? Why, by looting it from others, of course! Sustain your wealth by robbing it from your fellow citizens, and then invest said wealth into an elaborate castle, complete with hordes of monsters and deadly gauntlets of traps that your neighbors must brave if they wish to do the same to you!

...Thus spake the backstory. What this all means is: pick a hero, design a castle full of traps and monsters, and raid other player's castles while they raid yours. As a player, your job is to raid castles and acquire loot, then spend it to create a castle filled with minions and traps, all placed within the modular rooms the game provides, in order to protect the ill-gotten gains you took from OTHER such castles, all made by other players. Well, not ALL, there's some static NPC castles, but you get my drift. The traps are varied and interesting, including such novelties as spring-loaded platforms which vault players in a specified direction, bricks of icy jell-o which fall from the ceiling to entrap the player, and giant, bladed hamster wheels which run back and forth along tracks (also includes an ON FIRE variant), The minions display a similar level of variety; each boasts an array of stats and special abilities that can be used to complement one another and exploit enemy players'weaknesses.

Now, I'll come right out and say it: I love games that let you design and build stuff. GMod, Minecraft, Terraria, Space Engineers; any game that allows me to build something will automatically pique my interest. I just love the idea of making crazy contraptions and showing them off to others. So, obviously, a game that lets me make a death fortress that other players have to run through for loot is a game that's gonna get high marks from me, right?

...Well, no.

See, Mighty Quest doesn't quite live up to all the promise of it's premise (that almost rhymed!). You might go into this game expecting to encounter a wide variety of player-built castles, each with a unique combination of traps and minions, right? Well, if so, you're ♥♥♥♥ out of luck, son, because all you're gonna get is a parade of copy/pasted ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stretching to the horizon.

Once you hit around level 20, all the player castles you raid are going to start seeming awfully familiar. Sure, they might have different cosmetic themes, or have slight variations in how they arragne rooms, traps or minions, but it all boils down to the same design philosophy: stack your strongest minions and traps into as few rooms as possible. The worst offender of this by far is the ever-present springtrap/totem/minionspam room - I don't know if this tactic has a name yet, so let's call it The Entombminator. Building The Entombinator is simple; take a room with a narrow entrance, put a Totem in the center, surround it with minions, and then put springtraps facing inwards in the entrance.

The way it works is as such: The player walks into The Entombinator's entrance and triggers the springtraps, which catapult him or her into the room. All the minions inside the room aggro the player and attempt to forcefeed them their own anus. If the player attempts to walk back out of the room, the springtraps will throw them back in... or, if the springtraps are still resetting, the totem will prevent the minions from leaving the room and heal them completely. In short, the only way to get past this combo is to kill every minion inside the room; and considering that the person who built this monstrosity likely stocked it with all his deadliest creatures, good ♥♥♥♥♥♥' luck with that.

You'll hardly ever see a design that tries something new or creative. It's just an endless mobius strip of the same castle with slight variations. In part, this is a fault of the genre: successful design elements are bound to be copied by other players. But if there's only a begrudgingly small handful of successful elements, THAT'S the fault of the developers.

Games that allow creativity are also obliged to ENCOURAGE creativity. If you can do anything, but only one thing works, then in reality you can only do that one thing. A creative game should allow for multiple options,; it should allow players' imagnations to run wild and create all sorts of crazy things. If a single build becomes the absolute best then you need to rebalance it; otherwise your game isn't creative anymore.

All of this is, of course, without mentioning the other issues of this game, such as the terrible character balance (Archer wins, everyone else wishes they were an archer), the lackluster community features, and the blatant pay-to-win design (although, this being Ubisoft, was anyone surprised?)

In short, Mighty Quest is an amazing concept that fell far short of the mark.

A great game that has sadly fallen to the PAY TO WIN habits, all curtsey of Ubisoft.

The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot is a Diablo/Dungeon Keeper style game that worked VERY well back when it was only a BETA. The idea of creating your castle/dungeon, placing traps and monsters to protect your loot and kill any players that wished to raid your castle. Sounds like the perfect game for a good time right?!

Well it was...

I originally bought this game for $20, the Founder Edition, which gave me access to the Closed Beta, 15k gems for purchases (which at the time was nothing), special Founders Pack costumes, special costumes that were part of being in the Closed Beta, and a couple of special gear/items/traps/monsters/bosses that required a very high level to use. I played a good chunk of it and had a blast playing it. After awhile though I had got bored and quit playing, deciding that down the road later I'd give it a try.

Well after almost 2 years I came back, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ did Ubisoft f*** this game up! Not only was I missing stuff, but they changed the game SO much that all of my stuff changed (for better and for worse.) The most noticeable change was that EVERYTHING can be bought with Gems. They added in so many more crafting materials to make everything it's not even funny, and most of them don't drop very often. I tried to see how much I could craft without purchasing any crafting packs, and I barely collected any resources, and could only craft a few basic monsters. So in the name of Science, I purchased the biggest pack of crafting resources you could, cause you know I have 12k just laying around doing nothing, and surprise you only get a few rare and legendary crafting materials... But not enough to craft my high end special bosses.

I want to point out, Free Users will get f***ed over easily. Crafting costs become insane real fast. From what I can tell, free users can only hold a maximum of 2000 gold, and at lvl 10 all gear becomes way more than that.

Oh, and here is another fun tib bit. Somewhere in between me quitting 2 years ago and playing it again, my entire castle got wiped of it's traps/monsters and was left empty but 1 chicken placed in it. And the best part is?! I LOST ALL OF THEM! I did not get any of those monsters or traps back, they were not placed into my inventory, they were straight up deleted. I had a bunch of extra monsters, traps, and rooms in my inventory, and every single one of them was gone, so the game was forcing me to BUY every single one of them again, including my super expensive boss monsters. G f***ing G Ubisoft!


So congratulations Ubisoft! You ruined a great game once again! This is why I don't buy games from you anymore.

(Open Beta review)

PROS
Great trailer videos (Totally sold me on this game).

CONS
Quite literally everything else.

Overall Rating: 3/10 and would not recommend.

The Nitty Gritty:

1. You start your game (having to create a Uplay account, STEAM isn't enough) and are on your way to disappointment. Create your character (only one mind you) you have to pay real money to unlock any of the other three. Play through a GRUELING tutorial (seriously, I almost quit just because of the crappy non-optional tutorial). And away you go!

2. There is absolutely no plot or any kind of story at all; nor is there any form of character development. The Hero Skill system is laughable, providing no customization for unique heroes. Every Knight is the same as every other knight and so it goes for the other three one dimensional pay-to-play characters you can choose from.

3. Castle runs take anywhere from :30 (Beginner castles) to 10:00 (Higher level castles), leaving you feeling very unfulfiled and seriously disappointed in the 'Epic Loot'. Not to mention: your hero can't even defend your own castle. The only redeeming quality would be Castle Design, but even that leaves you frustrated. You're given the opportunity to select a castle model and you're not given the option to restart your castle if you wanted to try another model. You're provided with one free castle theme, but in order to try any others you're hit with another pay-wall in order to unlock them.

Designing your castle is as basic as it can be: Place this room here, place this trap there, & place this creature here. Simple and boring.

Traps:
The very definition of a trap is: 'any device, stratagem, trick, or the like for catching a person unawares.' However, you can plainly see where EVERY trap is located. What's the point of planting a trap, if it's in plain sight?

You are provided with a (very) limited number of traps to begin with, which can be purchased with in-game acquired gold. The rest require certain items to build; the item drop-rate of which is RIDICULOUSLY low. However, you can buy (yet another pay-wall) 'Item Packs' which provide you with more items than you would be able to find in a month of playing.

Monsters:
(View 'Traps') Pay-to-Play in order to create Low/Medium/High level creatures after you have exhausted your miniscule pool of gold-purchaseable creatures. Or, spend scores of hours on repetitive game-play attempting to farm the required components. As it stands now, I have roughly 55 hours of time invested and have been able to create one low-level creature.

... and why only Monsters? I'm fortifying a castle, not a dungeon. Where are the Knights? The Archers? Monks? Mages? Mercenaries? Not even a standing militia? Why are frogs and chickens defending/living in a castle!??!

Castle Rooms:
The only real difference between the many different rooms are where the entry points are located. Sure, some have pillars, some are wider, some are longer, but there is nothing truly 'unique' about them. There are no Libraries you can create, no latrines, no dinning halls, no barracks rooms, no training rooms, no torture chambers, no ball rooms, no archery ranges, no horse stables, no grave yards or tombs; no chapels, no game rooms, no bars, nor any dungeons or cells; no gallows, no rickety bridges over pools of lava, no towers to scale, no princesses to save, no secrets to uncover, nor any lore to discover.

Lets not forget the constant advertisements. Every time you log in, there are advertisements that pop up asking you to 'Buy this Special!" or 'Save if you buy this now!'. There's even a permanent icon on the left side of the screen that takes you to a menu of their current sales and pay-to-play content.

Conclusion:
Being a huge fan of both 'Diablo' & 'Dungeon Keeper' (two games which were directly compared to this one) I really, REALLY wanted to like this game. Why else invest 50+ hours in a game that is absolutely no fun to play? The pay-to-play aspect is beyond absurd; especially considering this is still in it's Beta phase.

I can't in good conscience recommend this game to anyone who isn't a glutton for punishment or has yet to mentally develop further than a four-year-old. Minesweeper is more entertaining.

Fun concept marred by bad Free to Play and Pay to Win implementation.

The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot lets you build a castle full of monsters and traps, tower-defense style, and lets you raid your neighbour's dungeons and steal their resources. Think Orcs Must Die meets Stronghold meets Diablo.

While designing mydungeon to be as nasty as possible and invading the awful or amazing dungeons of my neighbours was really fun, the monetization model eventually left me feeling unfulfilled and bored with the game at the same time. Reviews stating the game is no longer Pay to Win must have become outdated again sometime during the game's long run in Early Access. Typical issues include (17-Oct-2014):

- Very slow grind for resources
- Premium currency "Bling"(can be grinded for without paying... VERY slowly. The game prefers you buy the best value 70 euro currency pack instead)
- Premium-currency-only items
- Premium currency can buy everything (barring most gear, although rerolling and upgrading gear with Bling is possible)
- Powerful and/or rare in-game item sales. (My Steam purchase netted me a giant boss-dragon complete with stuns, flaming breath and flaming trails of death I could use in my level 1 dungeon)
- Purchasable XP/Gold/Loot boosts
- Daily quests chores

Mighty Quest's payment model is not nearly as bad as it could be due to its asynchronous nature; you never directly do battle with other players. Instead, purchasing an overpowered dungeon filled with expensive traps and monsters will serve as adding a difficult dungeon for those who enjoy a challenge, or as an overpowered dungeon to ignore for those who do not. Unfortunately, the payment model is bad enough to significantly impact the amount of enjoyment you can get out of the game without paying through the nose or by grinding. If you are a completionist, or are into min-maxing, or are impatient, or have a competitive mindset, (in other words, if you're a gamer...) this will impact you.

Great concept, good for a decent time, feel like I mostly got my money's worth, feel bad afterwards and can't actually recommend to anyone. Think junk food.

Good concept, poor implementation.

The hack-n-slash element starts off feeling basic and never really goes anywhere, don't expect your character to develop a great deal beyond slightly shinier loot. The classes and skills never felt particularly well balanced, with a lot of the balance patches at best feeling arbitrary and at worst made by people who don't actually appear to know very much about their game.

The dungeon building element at first feels like it could be good fun, with some good potential for murdering attacking players with a variety of traps and monsters. You'll quickly begin to realise that it's exceedingly shallow, with repetitiveness kicking in quickly. The only practical differences between two random player dungeons is what monster and castle skins they wanted and, importantly, how much real money they were prepared to spend.

Pay to win is strong with this one and, if you aren't dropping real money on it, you're going to be at a significant disadvantage attacking or defending against those who do.

The whole thing has the feel of a mobile or browser game that you dip in to now and then, playing short sessions and paying money to make things happen quicker. It doesn't stop there though, you can spend money to buy outright stronger dungeon defences and markedly better weapons. You could likely get there eventually without spending a penny but it's going to take a very long time and a whole lot of grind.

Top all this off with a nice dollop of mandatory Uplay client and you have fairly shallow and dull game, that will never tire of you spending money on it.

[NOTE]: I have downloaded this game from its official website and played most of my time (around 70+ hours) on it, before downloading on Steam, mind the low playtime.

Okay so I get this game when it was in Open Beta, back one year ago.
It was all fun to play and so on (I haven't played Diablo III at that time, otherwise I would have uninstalled this game and made my life 10 times better).. but it was forcing you to play non-stop. Haven't played for... 2 DAYS?? That's it, you got raided of money, crystals and almost all your crowns! That is, frankly, just horrible, Ubisoft. What were you thinking? I had the urge of uninstalling because of this downside really often. I opened the game to buy some new upgrades for my castle, but.. guess what? 50 players defeated my defense and ''stole'' all my items (and, please, don't come saying my castle defense rating was too bad and it's my fault; if you've played 5 hours you probably know that ALL, literally ALL people are using the same techinques to avoid traps and kill all minions faster; it's basically no matter what you do, your castle will get raided of everything and the only way to keep up in the leaderboards is to play non-stop, which won't happen, at least for me).
Alright so new games got out and I uninstalled, with a bright smile, this game, promising I will never touch it again and cry at how empty my chests would be if I haven't played for more than a week.
Now it gets ''fully released'' (which is not surpringly, really, Ubisoft is well-known for selling half-finished games) and reappears on my Steam Market page.
Nostalgia hits me in the hardest moments and I couldn't help but reinstall it, REALLY HOPING (praying while it was downloading) that Ubisoft did something about that horrible downside.
And guess what?
Exactly. They didn't do ♥♥♥♥.
Surprisingly I still had a few gold and crowns when I started the game, but that most probably was because my castle was inactive for too long and it just wouldn't show up on other's PC. The gameplay was almost the same, they just made the HUD 3x times uglier. That was 2 weeks ago.
Today I open it up (repeat, 2 weeks after last launch) just because of boredom, and guess what? EVERYTHING was raided from my castle.... That is just NOT what I call a good, fun game, a game which you enjoy playing.
Let me get one thing straight before I summarize this review: I LIKE the fact that people are also playing on my castle. After all it's ok to lose from time to time, so it wasn't the number of looters that dissapointed me. As stated, it's just publisher's fault for making a horrible balance. It's fine for me to see them getting to my treasure room (using the same techniques from one year ago, doesn't seem that Ubisoft give a damn about rebalancing those either), but losing everything you worked HOURS on? No, that is the ULTIMATE BUG, gamebreaking, unimmersive and leaving you in hatred for knowing that you could've spent those hours in other activities, which would let your effort be seen afterwards).

TL'DR
*sigh* It's rarely that I get to be so dissapointed by a video game. I have played not-so-great games (with a rating under 50 from Metacritic) and all user reviews not recommending it, and I can say that NONE, EVER, was so bad as this game. And it's just sad, The Mighty Quest had a FINE gameplay, but really, Ubisoft ALWAYS has to ruin their games in some way... If it's not horrible optimized, then let's just add a game-breaking mechanism.
I am not glad to say this, but this game has definitely shown me just how bad a game can make me feel. Uninstalled, unsubscribed and hope not to hear from it again (at this point it just brings too bad memories to take it only as a simple game; it's dozens of hours ruined, in fact, fake giving me the impression I would finally achieve something..)

For this review I am not going to add a [+] and [-] rubric, nor a personal rating. I just want to finish with it already and forget about it. If you have tried it, I bet you can relate, if not, I beg of you not to play this game, unless you like gathering a lot of gold and then see it all gone in a matter of time.

I played this game about two years ago.
It was great back then... even though sometimes had problem with the game launcher :)
I remember that one character was for free and you had to pay to unlock the others, also you could buy a pet to help you collect drops - it was ok.

I spent some time in game, leveled up my hero and castle as well noticing it's getting more and more grindy, but it was still fun...
With more time spent, I realized what kind of traps combinations work out very well in narrow corridors, to help protect your mines and maintain current castle rank - that was awesome!

Today I started this game and sadly find out my defences are simply gone ! No traps at all (I've got plenty before). Not a single monster as well !
What the heck ?!

My castle was downgraded to few rooms with power generators on flor !
Now I need to collect some stupid resources to rebuild it all ?
And pay for it ?!

Is this crazy or what ?!

This should be fun not fu ckn punishment !

So, as you can see : this game WAS quite good and fun to play.
Now it's broken, devs are untrustworthy and greedy.

My advice : stay away from it !

P.S.

I hope that this game will get more negative than positive reviews - maybe it will force ubisoft to rethink their practice of destroying good games while trying to squeeze every penny from it.
And that's the only reason I wrote this review...

This was a very good game for a couple of months. However it turned into a pay-to-win.
Would not recommed