Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff Review

There's a lot of controversy surrounding Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff and I'm not even talking about its fairly offensive humor. That sense of humor is nothing that hasn't already been seen in the TV show (of which I'm an occasional fan), so its mileage pretty much depends on one's enjoyment of the source material. No, the real controversy stems from two things: how Fox were far from keen to embrace the community spirit of iOS last week, and how Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff is essentially The Simpsons: Tapped Out all over again.

Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff is a tapathon of a game. Sure many freemium city building type games are, but this is a title that really lacks any sense of skill or imagination. Players control Peter Griffin as he rebuilds Quahog through recruiting other characters to do his dirty work, as well as construct new buildings. It's slow going. As is typically the way, early quests don't take too long to complete, but soon enough there are hours to wait before anything is achieved.

In between each quest is a bit of a storyline, intended to make one laugh at its crudeness or brashness. In reality though, it's just not that funny. With such content confined to text boxes it loses any sense of comic timing that often works for the TV show.

Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff is also exceptionally keen on making its players spend money. Within only a few minutes of starting out, one quest line requires one to spend $4.99 on some clams (the premium currency that enables players to skip the timers) and there's no way of getting rid of it from the list without doing so. For those keen to clear their quest log, it's going to infuriate.

There are some glimmers of imagination within Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff such as the ability to level-up characters individually, thereby unlocking new abilities (which inevitably tie into progress elsewhere), plus each of these characters has a Facebook page of sorts to read through. It's really not enough though.

Lacking any sense of strategy or challenge, Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff is time consuming busywork. It's going to take a heck of a long time to get anywhere playing it, and that destination isn't even particularly fun.