A lengthy, rewarding game that offers plenty to RPG and puzzler fans alike.
The Xbox live Arcade service has become something of a magnet for puzzle games lately, with classics such as Tetris and Bejewelled sitting alongside modern hits like Lumines, E4 and Hexic. It's getting to be an overcrowded genre, whereas just a few years ago it seemed like the casual puzzler was dead and gone. So what can one more puzzler, and a PSP port at that, have to offer?
Well, fortunately, Puzzle Quest isn't just 'one more puzzler'. Sure, there's a puzzle element here- in fact, a pretty big one, as the title might suggest. But there's so much more to it than that. Truly, it's probably best to think of the game less as a mind-bending addictive puzzle title, and more as a roleplaying game- since that's what it really is, at its core. It has all the traditional RPG trappings- you make a character from a choice of archetypes which determines your starting skills that you can use in battle, you have to manage an inventory full of items of varying power, you'll attract companions who'll join you on your quest, gain experience and money, and even use a turn-based battle system to defeat your enemies.
It's just that the turn-based battle system happens to look and play a lot like Bejewelled and its match-the-coloured-gem derivatives. Don't let that dissuade you, though- the battle system is every bit as deep as you'd find in any other RPG, since you share the grid of gems with your opponent and take turns trying to match 3 gems of the same colour in a line. In Puzzle Quest, these gems represent different elements of Mana. Matching 3 or more adds the amount to your mana reserves which you need to cast spells, so matching a bunch of red gems will give you enough power to cast some fire spells, for instance. Matching 4 gems will give you an extra turn to build up the mana you need before your opponent gets his turn, and matching 3 or more skulls will inflict damage on your opponent. Deal enough damage and you'll have defeated them- but the same goes for you, too, of course. But you can always buy some better equipment or get yourself some experience and level up if you're finding a battle too hard. *Now* does it sound more like a role playing game?
But of course, all this puzzling would be useless if it wasn't tied together by a storyline. And, shock of shocks, it is. And actually, it's not even a bad one. You'll be fighting for your home country of Bartonia against the growing Undead legions of the Lord Bane, but there are plenty of other quests you'll need to undertake along the way; stopping an Orc warlord from raising an army, for instance, or recovering the body parts of an ancient Minotaur king. There are also various side-quests that allow you to recruit companions to your cause, and these will open up more quests further into the game. Fortunately, the story doesn't take itself particularly seriously- for every fantasy hallmark the game throws at you you can expect to see a tongue-in-cheek take on another, like the Orc who sends you on a series of quests to get him various foodstuffs, like Scorpions and volcanic rocks, or the loveable gnoll thief who's stolen the crown jewels. You can move your character around the lovingly drawn world map, from town to town, and pick up various quests and items along the way, as well as blunder into some 'random' battles, too. You can also siege towns you come across, basically starting a lengthy battle against a powerful enemy, which allows you to then access your citadel and gain monthly income from the town. Your citadel is also where some of the other game modes come in to play, in the games more innovative ideas- learning skills, crafting items, and training mounts.
You can learn skills from enemies that you capture in the game. To capture an enemy, you have to have fought it at least 3 times, then solve a puzzle where you must match up the gems on the screen in order to clear them. Some of these can be particularly tricky, but they offer a nice diversion from the standard game mode. Training Mounts and learning skills are different again; once you captured a creature you can ride, you can increase its skills by defeating it in a time-limited battle, and you can learn skills from captured enemies by matching set amounts of coloured gems, but if you run out of possible moves its game over. Crafting items is similar; in order to craft anything you need to obtain runes which can be found in regions of the world, and defeat their powerful guardians in order to obtain their crafting rune. There's more to it as well, of course; you can only take a set amount of skills into battle and only four items, so you need to chose wisely and make sure your skills complement one another, and your character also has a series of traits that determine how much damage he or she deals when matching skulls, how much mana of each colour he can store at any one time, and so on. All in all, its surprisingly deep, and after you've finished the lengthy single player campaign you can always go back and play as a different character class to try out some different skills, or maybe try your hand at free play one off matches against the computer, or against another player online. The multiplayer mode is nothing special, but it's there, and for your achievement purists there's only two achievements tied to the multiplayer game and that's just for beating another player and beating five other players.
The game's not without its shortcomings, however. It suffers a little from 'Oblivion-syndrome', which scales up the levels of your opponents to match yours as you progress through the game. Whilst this serves to provide you with a challenge, it also renders much of your additional questing pointless, since it devoids you of any real reason to level up your character. Compounding this is the fact that some of the opponents are fiendishly cheeky, possessing an almost godlike knowledge of which gems are going to fall next and in what order. Sometimes you'll go through a battle and barely get a turn; the enemy will magically manage to match 4 gems every single turn. Also, there are some odd graphical problems- for the most part the visuals are lovely, but the world map is obscenely small, with no way to zoom in, and the text suffers from HD syndrome, which renders it virtually unreadable on a SD tv. Moreover, the game suffers from the odd hitch when you use a power or when it loads a sound sample, resulting in a delay. It's not game-breaking by any means, but it can be a little distracting.
But really, it speaks volumes about the quality of the game that I'm reduced to citing these minor mishaps- none of the issues really make the game suffer overmuch, and the sheer depth of the game, coupled with its surprising length, make Puzzle Quest a worthy purchase for RPG and puzzle aficionados alike, as well as those just looking for a fun casual game to while away the time with. Truthfully, Puzzle Quest puts most of its competition on Xbox Live Arcade to shame, in both design, implementation, presentation, and certainly in value for money.