Yeah, when this game first came out several years ago, myself and many others were quite obviously intrigued. Piecing the words "puzzle" and "quest" together instantly makes one think "puzzle RPG", which, well, is exactly what this game is. The game involves your hero character (obviously) who ends up wrapped up in a war against the evil Lord Bane who is apparently in the process of assembling a dark army in an attempt to conquer the world (sound familiar?). While the plot is simple and nothing particularly unique, it's surprisingly in-depth, and the various party members and characters you meet have well-designed back stories and personalities.
The game play itself involves a Bejeweled-esque system where you shift two adjacent gems in order to make matches of three or more. However, in this game, the gems you match add mana of that particular element to your mana pool (earth, wind, fire, or water), give you gold, experience, or inflict damage to your opponent. You then can use your stored mana to cast spells and abilities to hinder your opponent, inflict damage, heal yourself, cast buffs, or clear gems on the board. As you battle enemies and progress through the game, you gain experience and gold, increase your various stats, equip (and eventually craft) weapons and armor, even ride a mount, seize control of cities, and capture monsters to learn more spells from them, and beyond the primary plot, there are numerous side quests to keep you occupied and help you build up your character.
This game has a surprising amount of depth, and the gameplay is ridiculously addicting, especially when it comes to finding ridiculous (and often unfair) combos of spells and equipment. Although the puzzle game itself is incredibly monotonous and the matches tend to take far too long (especially late game, when you and all enemies have tons of HP), I still managed to find myself playing this game whenever I needed to kill time but not devote all of my attention to a game. As a result, I ended up playing this game very, very slowly over several years. It often got too boring and tedious for me to just sit down and consistently play.
This game is available on just about every platform in existence, and I played it on the DS, so I have no idea what the differences are between versions, but the graphics, animations and special effects were rather lackluster, although they certainly do get the point across. Fanciful graphics aren't necessary for this sort of a game, but they certainly make it more appealing. The music (all of maybe two or three different tracks) is also bland and repetitive, and so are the sound effects. I played the game with sound muted most of the time, because of how "bleh" it was.
As with all games, there were a few disappointments. One in particular was the level cap. 50. I played as a druid (there are several classes to choose from), so I had a rough time leveling up at first, but I ended up hitting level 50 long before I encountered the final boss. A friend of mine played as a knight character (who gets a huge focus and bonus on experience gems), and complained that they were level 50 before they even reached the halfway point of the game.
Another disappointment was the city seizure concept. I took control of every city and citadel I came across -- and I was disappointed that there was never any sort of rebellion or revolt. The game made it out like that would occur after so much in-game time passed, but this never, ever happened. I thought it would have been a really neat mechanic.
Finally, the spells. Each character class has multiple spells that, when used in a particular order or pattern, guaranteed victory. Even on the hardest difficulty setting, I had no problems completely preventing my opponent from acting at all, getting endless turns and completely dominating. I'd simply start the match with all of the mana I need to cast "Entangle" thanks to the equipment I was wearing, spam "Gust of Wind" to transform all gems into air gems, and repeat until I had enough mana to cast "Death Gaze", which pwned my opponent's HP. While fun, it completely ruins the multiplayer function of this game.
Puzzle Quest certainly isn't the best puzzle game in existence, but you have to give it huge credit for combining the puzzle and RPG genres for the first time.Surprisingly in-depth and certainly time-consuming, it's a great game to play casually if you have a ton of time to kill. Unfortunately, it seemed a little cheaply made and had far too many easily exploitable strategies to make it actually "challenging" like the title's name suggests.
- Audio: 1
- Gameplay: 4
- Originality: 5
- Story: 3
- Visuals: 2
- Overall: 3
- Difficulty: Adjustable (I played on Hard, and it certainly was difficult)
- Completion Time: Variable, based on class and difficulty (Definitely took me +40 hours as a druid)
+ Very clever concept; the source of the puzzle-RPG hybrid genre boom
+ Surprisingly in-depth storyline with plenty of characters
+ Addictive gameplay
- Story is awfully cliche for a fantasy-themed game
- Terrible audio and lackluster graphics
- Cheap, exploitable strategies make multiplayer a joke
