A lot of people are going to be surprised seeing me writing this game review. I’m not known to be a gamer, especially considering the fact that most people believe ladies don’t like games, I bet it's weirder coming from me lol. But I’m all about Hive and if this concerns Hive in any way, I’m open to trying it.

When I opened the game, I saw the quest for stoken loading page with Spacebar written at the bottom left. So I pressed Spacebar and the game started.

When the game started, I first tried to move forward and back and I realized the arrow keys were what was used for movement.

But there was a high wall in-front of me
and I had to jump. It took a little while before I could figure out that the spacebar was the key for jumping.

At first, I thought I could only jump once. But then I saw a brick wall and tried to jump on it but couldn’t, so after several attempts, I mistakenly pressed the spacebar twice and surprisingly, I realized I could jump twice.

Before I jumped on that brick wall, I saw a bonfire at the bottom here and when I got close, I was prompted to press X. When I did, I lit up the fire. For doing that, I got some points.

You can see points you collect in the top right corner of the screen, as well as your score in the middle, and your number of lives left together with your health bar on the top left.

I met my first monster which was a blue-looking troll not far from where I started the game. I got killed by him before I was able to figure out I could attack it by pressing the shift key. In a later part of the game, I saw other monsters like UFOs and even killer pigeons.

Because I was using the shift key to strike, it turned on sticky keys if I tried to attack the troll too fast. That slowed my strike rate because trying to strike too many times will just turn on sticky keys and by the time I would’ve moved my cursor to close the sticky-key dialogue box, I would’ve been killed.

I was really surprised when I saw that at some point, there were Qr codes embedded in the walls in the game. Out of curiosity of what the QR leads to, I pulled my phone out and scanned it, and behold, it led to the Skate Hive Discord. I found this really cool.

It took me a few tries and deaths, but I was able to complete the first level I was at and proceeded to the next level which seemed to be in a city environment. This level was a bit more difficult to complete because there was more monsters here and also more pits to fall in. It was at this level I encountered the killer pigeons.

This was my score at the end of the second level. Not bad for an amateur who doesn’t play often.

I even made it to the third level. Seeing that I’m not much of a gamer, I was pretty proud of myself for having made it that far. I liked the difficulty level of the game - it’s not too hard for a non-gamer and amateur like me, but I have a feeling it also won’t be too easy for pros.

I ran into these bigger UFOs here. Those were not playing around. Lol

My recommendations

• I recommend that in further updates to improve gameplay, the developers try to include a way for us to be able to customize the functional keys ourselves. Having to deal with sticky keys turning on continuously and causing me multiple lives was annoying to be honest.
• Also, I think it would be nice to get a pause button for maybe in case I have to leave the game to handle something. I guess I could always just maximize my browser and leave though, but I’m not sure whether that’ll work because I didn’t try it. But even if it would, it’ll still be great to get a pause button.
• I noticed also that if I didn’t zoom in for the game to fill most of the screen, the game lagged a bit. Maybe there can be improvement in the game there?

Over all though, I think this is a pretty awesome game. I haven’t played many games, so I can’t make comparisons, but I really loved playing Quest for Stoken and I do look forward to seeing the updates the dev team have in store for us.

_{Do check out the contest rules here
Images are screenshots from the game site}