TinyCo has teamed with the creators and writers of Family Guy to create an iOS experience based on the hit show. The premise behind Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff is that flaming chickens were released all over Quahog after Peter’s fight with the Giant Chicken. Now your task is to rebuild the city, and you need stuff to do it.
Quahog Has Been Destroyed!
There is a lot of “stuff” to do and get in this game. All of your favorite characters from the show are present, and each character has different stuff that they can do, earning you coins, items, and experience points. Peter can play “fat leap frog” with Chris, Quagmire can do the “giggity dance”, and Bonnie can chug a bottle of wine. As you unlock and build buildings, each of these have things you can do to earn stuff too. There is a main experience meter, but each character has their own experience as well. When a character levels up, it unlocks more stuff for them to do.
There are all sorts of quests to complete, and you can rebuild and arrange the town however you like, from the buildings down to the smallest details like flower patches and hedges. You can also customize your characters’ outfits, so if you want Peter to be a Mermaid (er, Mer-man), that can be done.
Might As Well Be the Show
The game looks like an episode of Family Guy. All of the characters, buildings, landscapes, and everything else are exactly as they are in the show. Things do tend to be a little smaller, as you are playing from a three-quarters perspective, but there is the ability to zoom in and out in order to zero in on buildings or characters, or take a big-picture look at your city. For my money, the graphics couldn’t be much better. Sure, they could have put a little more detail into some of the more prevalent areas like water, grass and the streets, but all in all, the game is very well animated.
Much like the look of FG, the audio and sound effects are very similar to the show. The music that is playing is the Family Guy theme with some additional filler, as performed by an orchestra. That is to say, it sounds very well produced, but can get a little old if you’re playing the game for a while. All the voices and the sound effects are the same as well. Every so often, the dialogue would sound a bit grainy; far from the point that I couldn’t understand it, but there was definitely a lack of clarity to it.
Control-wise, there weren’t really any issues. Actions are performed and stuff is gained by tapping on characters and/or buildings. You can easily move buildings, decorations, or even people with a tap and a drag. The menus are fairly easy to navigate, and once you get a feel for which buttons do what on the screen, you’ll be rebuilding Quahog to its former glory in no time.
Funny, But Not Much More
Family Guy (the show), in my humble opinion, is hilarious. This game is no different. Some of the actions that characters can perform are ridiculous, and the dialogue and one-liners are brilliant and will have you laughing out loud. Sadly, beyond that, this game didn’t really grab me. There is a lot of “stuff” in this game, but I found myself wondering what the point was. A great example of this was a feature called Facespace. It’s a faux social media outlet within the game – that looks exactly like Facebook – where characters post status updates, and you can gain more friends as you unlock characters.
You can actually share to your real-world Facebook or Twitter account from here, but there isn’t anything to it besides maybe reading a few funny posts. This just seems to be the story of the game as a whole: it’s a lot of fluff (albeit funny fluff) and not so much substance. The story of the game is basically this: tap a character to make them perform an action that takes an hour in order to gain some experience to unlock another action that takes two hours to unlock another action that will take four hours to… You get the point; not exactly amazing gameplay. The ability to build Quahog as you see fit is kind of cool, but not enough to make this game great.
Final Verdict
Devotees of the show might love this game just for the reason that it’s Family Guy. If you want some good laughs, this game will provide them for you. But if you want gameplay that makes you want to keep coming back, this might not be the right fit. Don’t worry though; you can always get your Family Guy fix on TV.
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