Dash Quest is a weird game, on paper it's a straightforward RPG where all you do is dash in one direction and kill enemies by hitting them with your weapon, cast spell and use items, all in order to get gold and complete challenges in service of buying better weapons and getting more options to kill enemies and repeat the cycle anew. In practice it's a mess of gameplay modes, in-app purchases, abysmally slow progression and buggy mechanics, I didn't have much fun with it.
The game opens with you having to go through a few stages in order, starting with a goblin forest, the mechanics are almost self-explanatory, you tap on the left side of the screen to block and on the right side to attack. If you hold attack, you'll charge a magic ball that you throw forward. There are spell and item icons, regulated by cooldowns, mana, and limited quantities. Even then, I couldn't figure out how the game actually works. There is a barrage of enemies that throws itself at you and piles up quite quickly without it being clear what you should do. Would blocking help? Is my best move to slash as fast as I can at the ten foes square in front of me, dealing damage? Add ranged attackers, status ailments and obstacles on the road, and it gets extra confusing. Is there a rhythm to how you play? Can you get 'better' at dealing with enemies, or do you just take damage while flailing around?
After a while, there is a boss fight against a goblin king and the game tries to teach you about blocking. It's a bit like a punch-out match, the boss moves around then dashes at you and then a symbol telling you to block pops up. But if you block at that precise time, you'll just get hit (and not understand what you did wrong), you need to block quite a few moments AFTER the symbol appears. Worse yet, the boss has other attacks where he throws rocks at you, then charges you. The blocking is so imprecise - or maybe it's on an invisible cooldown timer - that you can only block the rock OR the boss charge, so you always take some damage whatever you do, it's frustrating, and a bad learning experience. Then you get some gold and move on to the next level where you die quite quickly and start over from the goblin forest.
That gold is used to buy many things, weapons, armors, spells, consumables, trinkets, pets, etc. You also level up and unlock new skills in which you can dump points in. There also are signs that you reset the game when you finish it, getting a new currency to buy even more skills so you go further in your next run. In theory, all of this is pretty great, but the rate at which you can buy new items is so slow that I just got demoralized and stopped playing. I've been at it all evening and I only had a quarter or so of the gold needed to buy the next weapon in the shop, and there is plenty of stuff to buy. So you slowly get stronger until you manage to find 'adventure mode' which is what the game should've been in the first place, without the weird five-stage mode tacked on.
Anyways, I didn't get very far in Dash Quest, amidst the Best Value IAPs, the ads playing after levels and the weird mechanics. There were a few cool ideas here and there, but the core of the game felt like a ploy to have me pay real money on microtransactions. This is just another instance of that problem and it has turned me away from another game.
