Nintendo Switch Critic Reviews

PONG Quest is a delightful game that masterfully combines retro gameplay with a dungeon crawling RPG formula. It may not have the most stylish visuals or long-lasting gameplay yet it remains a highly enjoyable and charming take on a timeless classic.

Considering their amazing catalog, I’m not sure why Atari keeps trying to make 1972’s Pong relevant for modern gamers. Pong Quest is a clever, valiant run at it, aided by solid controls and some decent multiplayer life. But it’s still just Pong, and the game is at its best when they help you forget that.

While it’s great that so much has been added to a classic, even with exploration elements, new attack balls, and a shiny coat of paint, Pong Quest can quickly become repetitive. It’s enjoyable in small doses, but ultimately, it’s still just Pong.

Pong Quest has real heart and soul, it just hasn’t been properly thought through, and that’s a shame, as the flimsy story is genuinely likeable.

Really, PONG Quest as a whole would probably benefit from more time in development. It comes across as incomplete on occasion, with gameplay that might be very engaging with a faster pace of movement and another gimmick or mechanic to go along with the special balls. The dungeon crawling is similarly half-baked, offering a sense of exploration not quite on par with even a game like Adventure on Atari 2600. Even with these shortcomings there’s still enough to enjoy that retro gaming fans or even longtime Atari aficionados may want to give PONG Quest a chance, but for everyone else there are more inventive games of this ilk to consider playing.

PONG Quest seems a first like a nice mix between the old-school Pong matches and the rogue-lite/dungeon crawler genres. But thanks to generic and random dungeons, too much randomness and a useless length, the old fans of old might not see the end of its five stages, and mandatory grinding. Too bad, because some fights were worth the trip.

Sparsely laid out, mechanically simplistic, and generally a bit of a bore to play, PONG Quest fails to do anything meaningful with this most neglected of gaming properties. The adventuring element is paper-thin, and even the game of bat-and-ball at the heart of its battle system feels flat and lifeless. As always with Pong, local multiplayer is your best bet for fun, but there's little that's fresh about that.

PONG's fame comes from its historic significance and not its gameplay, and it takes a lot more than PONG Quest offers to make that gameplay fun.

Pong Quest wasn’t just a mediocre game, it was an infuriating one. Wonky enemy AI, a terrible special ball and HP system, and a lack of content made the game feel like a chore to play, as opposed to being a good time. When I wasn’t bored with the lack of substance to this game, I was aggravated by every enemy encounter and the core battle mechanics. When the best part of the game is the classic local multiplayer Pong experience from nearly 50 years ago, that should say a lot about the quality of the game. If you really want to play the original Pong on Switch, that should be the only reason you should be picking up this title.