Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff plays a whole lot like The Simpsons: Tapped Out, which makes sense, seeing as it’s another beloved property from Fox and they want to stick with what works. But The Quest for Stuff takes what makes Tapped Out so addictive and fun and improves upon it in many ways, all while keeping the more irreverent humor of the show intact. If you hate the many free-to-play world building titles that litter the App and Google Play stores this certainly won’t change your mind about them, but anyone who can appreciate having momentary spurts of fun with a game like this should download it immediately.
The game starts with this video, which shows how the town of Quahog got destroyed. (Two words- Giant. Chicken.) It’s now up to you to rebuild all the locations from the show, find all the inhabitants and perform quests in order to reveal more of the town and get everything back to normal.
But before I say any more, a note. I didn’t play this game the way you will.
For this review developer TinyCo dumped a ton of premium currency into my account, because there would be simply no way to get through the bulk of the game's content without a boost. Like other free-to-play titles Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff utilizes the most dreaded of all game mechanics- timers. When you choose an action for a character it will take a certain amount of time for them to complete it, anywhere from six seconds, to four hours, to a day or more. The deeper you get into the game the longer the timers get, which is why some gamers hate this style of game. It's not the kind of game you can just sit down to play for an hour straight- it's designed to be played for for a few free minutes here and there, setting your characters to complete actions and trying to structure it around your schedule so it makes sense. (About to go to sleep? Set those characters for eight hour actions and get them working!)
