VeryLittle GravitasIndeed
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Puzzle Quest,
A quick review of Puzzle Quest, I haven't finished it yet, but I am close  .
This is a puzzle game with RPG elements. The puzzle game is basically matching like gems. Like Bejewelled but with more strategy.
If you don't like puzzle games then you won't like it.
If you like puzzle games then you'll love it.
You have a grid of gems of different colours, as well as skulls and coins and stars. The different colour gems represent mana, one of 4 types. The Skulls represent damage, coins represent gold, and Stars represent experience. By matching 3 or more of these you collect the mana, experience, gold, or do damage to your enemy. Matching 4 gems gets you an extra turn. Matching 5 gems gets you an extra turn and a wild card, these match any mana gem, not skull money or exp gem, and have a multiplier which will increase the amount of mana you get.
Collecting mana allows you to cast spells that will deal damage or alter the puzzle board.
You get to choose one of 4 classes to start. Druid, Warrior, Knight or mage. The choice you make will define which skills you get by default and the costs to raise your skills.
There are skills for each mana type which improve the amount of mana from matching gems, skills for amount of damage from attacks, as well as HP and extra gold and experience. By collecting experience and levelling up you can then improve your character so when you match gems, you get better rewards.
In addition to the main game, there are "sub-games" that allow you to improve your character, you can capture the mobs you battle against and learn their skills. This allows you to use skills you would not normally get due to your class choice, or capture mounts you can ride which give bonuses. This means that class choice really doesn't affect skills available but only the cost for levelling your skills.
You can also craft items; I have not explored this part of the game yet.
You can train mounts and learn the spells from creatures you have captured.
However these mini-games all follow the idea of gem matching so if you don't enjoy the basic game mechanics they will offer you no respite
The game is a typical clichéd RPG, single man goes against the impossible and wins where armies have faltered etc. It may be clichéd but we love it anyway
Whilst the game is pretty much the same puzzle game played over and over again it different enemies and skills give the game strategy elements.
This is a good game and very fun, the kind of thing you find hard to put down.
However...
The bad parts.
First the most annoying thing is the amount of luck involved. It doesn't really matter because it is impossible to die in the game if you lose a puzzle you just retry*. However in many cases the computer is unbelievably lucky. I am calling it luck but in the old days we'd just say the computer cheats. Either way you may find that the computer can pull off an amazingly lucky amount of moves or damage at times. Which can be either just annoy you or allow it to win easily. Quite how this luckiness got past game testers I don't know. Perhaps the idea is that the luckiness makes you want to beat the computer again or something. However it can unfairly punish players who try to play a skill-full game and even if you aren’t interested in skill it punishes normal players when such feats of luck are rare for the player.
Next is that in the later game enemies start getting resistance to skills. In my experience unless you play a perfect game or even if you do this can cause again these issues with luck winning over skill. It seems also to side line skills as a way to do anything vs. just plain puzzle matching gems which is not penalised by resistance, or is only affected by the armours which have been around since the beginning of the game.
Ultimately this really means the game becomes rather one dimensional. There are really only two skills you have to train. Morale for more Hit points and Battle to do more damage when matching skulls. This way it is just a matter of denying the enemy as many chances to match skulls for damage, or make 4 or more of a kind. This also makes all classes not as good as the knight which has the lowest cost for those two skills. Sure your mana generation may be lower, however you can train skills using money, as such it is in-fact cheaper to train your mana collection skills with money and using the skill points to raise the important and cheap skills. Plus if you rely just on matching skulls you don't need mana anyway. Thus removing a great deal of the point of the RPG elements.
Some skills also ruin the game by being too powerful. One called Archery is insanely powerful. It does damage equal to the enemies yellow mana count. The computer usually being lucky will often have full mana of 30 or more points, if it doesn't it is easy to trick it into collecting yellow mana. This gives you an easy 1 hit wonder to take them down 30 points at a time and with enough mana you can use the skill 3 times in a single turn.
To be honest my negative comments are being overly picky. Alas as a strategy player I tend to analyse games down to the most bottom levels. And the negatives are mostly my personal tastes as far as games go.
Puzzle quest is a fun puzzle game. The RPG elements make it more interesting than a pure puzzler, and the cheezy story is as awesome as all truly cheezy RPG stories are.
One last thing. If you get puzzle quest get it on the DS. The touch screen is an obvious control method for this game. However the PSP version does not have this and as such playing these puzzles becomes a exercise in frustration as you use the normal PSP direction pad and buttons to play.
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10/23/2007, 7:09 am
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PainKilleRCE
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Registered: 05-2008
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Re: Puzzle Quest,
The DS version of this game to me is almost unplayable because of the small size of the icons on the touch screen (seriously, the puzzle pieces are obscured by the stylus when you try to move them around).
The PC version of this game is much easier to play, though harder to find unless you simply pay for a download.
Mana control is very important in the game, though as you said the resistance to spells can hamper this later in the game. At that point it helps if more of your spells affect you or the board rather than the enemy. Of course, the classes have very different play styles, making them more or less effective at different points of the game, and for different types of players.
You can prevent the computer from having too many *lucky* moments by controlling the board, but sometimes it just happens. I found that if I was really getting frustrated by a particular enemy getting lucky too often I could just level up somewhere else and overpower the enemy later.
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6/1/2008, 4:51 am
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