Review - Puzzle Quest

Game Info Box
Title: Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords
Publisher: D3
Developers: Infinate Interactive, 1st Playable, Engine Software, Vicious Cycle
Format: Nintendo DS

That's right. 4 developers allied to D3, a publisher who holds the western rights to Naruto and also produced the excellent PSP game PQ. So I have but one question. How could a publisher with a pedigree like that produce this soul-numbing slice of derivative crap?

Puzzle Quest is currently being regarded as the second coming of puzzle games. A second coming that really started when Meteos and Lumines came out, but we'll gloss over that. It is nearly impossible to find anywhere and even my copy was the last in the shop. So what do we get from such immense hype and build up?

We get Bejewelled. Or Zookeeper. Or a different name for the same freaking game that's been rehashed millions of times since Yoshi's Cookie on the SNES. Only wrapped up in a faux-RPG plot and presentation so thin that even a supermodel would eat it without puking. Swap pieces to make sets of 3, 4 or 5 and score points. Puzzle Quest tries to make this more exciting by having 2 players fight on the same grid taking turns to make moves. This means that they need a way of causing damage in the form of skulls on the board which cause damage to your opponent. As well as gold and experience points on the board alongside the standard 4 colours of mana gems its a fairly exhaustive set up, but easy enough to understand.

The main quest mode works by your character picking up quests and completing them. These quests follow a simple pattern of going to a location, fighting a few battles and returning home. And that's about it, there's a plot of some sort underneath it all about undead attacking the land but most players will ignore that as its really not that interesting or important.

Then there are single battle modes which have you either picking an enemy yourself or having one chosen at random. This is where the smart player will spend their time, free from random battles and trudging around the map.

There are capture puzzles to capture enemies you've defeated 3 or more times. These are just challenges to clear the board of all gems with no extra pieces falling from the top. They are hard and easily the most entertaining part of the game.

Then spell learning which gets you to play a basic game with no enemy just trying to clear the required number of gems. This is fairly boring in all honesty.

If it was just these game modes that bothered me I wouldn't feel so strongly about the game being poor, its the enemy AI. It is so terrifyingly unbalanced and unfair that you start thinking 'What's the point?'. Enemies in the quest mode are rarely, if ever a lower level than you and always seem to do immense amounts of damage through massive chain reactions and their spells. Its this AI that ruins the game, if it was more balanced and human then the game would be better.

Again, this could have been fixed by using that staple of modern DS games. Wi-Fi. But nope, Puzzle Quest is not online enabled and this is the final nail in its coffin.

In One Line
Poor AI, boring gameplay and a lack of online play means this game is not worth anyone's time.

Score
Two (2)