NyxQuest Review

NyxQuest is truly wondrous to look at. Encapsulating a beautiful indie hand drawn graphical style, Over the Top Games had a great success on their hands when they first released NyxQuest on the Wii back in 2009. Transferring it to the small screen of the iPhone hasn't changed a thing graphically. It's in terms of controls that the changes become quickly apparent.

Backtracking one moment, NyxQuest is all about a winged girl by the name of Nyx and her quest (bet that title just made so much more sense now, huh?) to find her missing friend Icarus, spanning a series of levels throughout ancient Greece. In doing so, Nyx must solve numerous puzzles as well as harness the powers of the gods in order to defeat her foes, as she can't kill them directly. These puzzles primarily focus on what made the WiiWare game so special, dragging platforms around amongst other things.

It's a process that fortunately still works on the iPhone with a touch of the finger supplementing the Wii remote's role. In doing so, it makes NyxQuest a puzzler as much as a platformer game. What doesn't work so well in this iPhone conversion is that of jumping and moving at the same time. Nyx can jump up to five times to move higher into the air, as well as glide. Unfortunately, jumping and moving at the same time never feels quite as reliable as it should. At times, the controls would react accordingly to my touch. At other times, it'd let me down hugely and become quite frustrating.

It's an unfortunate problem as NyxQuest is a more beautiful experience than the WiiWare version thanks to graphics looking more precise and less blemished. NyxQuest on the app store is very nearly the definitive version. On the iPhone it looks splendid enough with the iPad version looking even nicer. The overall experience lends itself well to the handheld format too with it being easy to drop in and out of NyxQuest without any game based interruptions.

Regardless of control niggles, NyxQuest is still a must buy, even more so at its introductory price, but it'd be nice to see a future update correct the control based inaccuracies.