DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue Preview

IGN brings us a quick preview of Hothead’s next humor-injected action RPG, DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue. An excerpt on quests and gameplay hours:

My biggest complaint about DeathSpank was how tedious a lot of the quests felt. Any RPG is going to have fetch quests, but with the exception of a few adventure-puzzler type quests, that was all you were doing. Although I was only able to see a couple of the quests available in Thongs of Justice, it does seem like the HotHead team has made an effort to tweak the quest formula. For example, in a time-based quest DeathSpank had to carry a lit stick of dynamite over to an enemy’s communication tower to blow it up, and another involved carrying extremely explosive nitroglycerin through a field of enemies without attacking anything. I’ve also been told that the developers have added in more adventure game-style quests, but this is one area I plan to reserve judgment on until I get more than 30 minutes with the game.

Clocking in around eight hours, DeathSpank was a bit short for my liking, though it was reasonably long for a downloadable title. Thankfully, Thongs of Virtue boasts a much bigger environment and story. How much bigger? Well, let’s just say that this time around you actually get to sail around on your very own pirate ship. There was no sign of T-Pain or mermaids, but DeathSpank will be on a boat. The plot of Thongs of Justice is also much more interesting than the first, and fans will finally be told the lore of the thongs.