If you go to a casual gaming web site (like, say, Big Fish Games), then you’ll find a ton of (matching games) or (match-3 games.) These games come in a bunch of shapes and sizes — and colors! — but they all have the same basic premise. You’re given a grid of symbols, and your goal is to slide the symbols either horizontally or vertically to create sequences of three or more. Typically, when you (match) the symbols in this way, they disappear from the board, and new symbols slide down to take their place, which allows you to repeat the process.
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is just such a matching game. However, unlike other games in this genre, which typically involve playing one puzzle board and then moving on to the next, with little or no (meat) to link the puzzle boards together, Puzzle Quest places you into a role-playing game landscape. You control a hero (who can be a druid, a knight, a warrior, or a wizard), and you have to explore your surroundings, battle monsters, collect equipment, and go on quests so you can save the world from a terrible threat.
The matching game part of the game comes up during battles. Each time you face off against an enemy, an 8×8 grid of symbols comes up, and you and your opponent have to take turns matching symbols until the issue is settled. If you lose the battle, you don’t die, and you don’t lose any experience or anything; you just have to try the battle again.
The symbols on the grid come in ten shapes. Four of the shapes are for the game’s four mana types (red, green, blue, and yellow). When you match mana symbols together, you gain some mana, which allows you to cast spells during the battle. For example, if you’re playing a knight then you get the stun spell, which (stuns) your opponent and allows you to take two turns in a row. But the spell requires six green mana and five red mana, so you have to gather some mana first before you can use it. There’s also a cooldown for the spell, so you can’t stun your opponent indefinitely.
There are also purple symbols, which when matched give you some experience points; gold coins, which give you some money; and skulls, which damage your opponent. There are also two rare symbols: (+5) skulls, which do extra damage, and wildcards, which not only match to any of the four mana types, but they also include a multiplier, so you can use them to fill up your mana bars very quickly.
Any time you match four or more symbols together, you get an extra turn, and so you have to carefully observe to the board to figure out what your best move is. Often the best move is obvious (you take a match-4 any time you can find it), but other times you have to make some decisions. Do you damage your opponent, go for mana so you can cast a spell, or try to match some gold or experience so that you’re more powerful after the battle?
As matching games go, the one employed by Puzzle Quest isn’t very complicated (since it doesn’t evolve in any way). But fortunately, Puzzle Quest has a lot of things going on outside of the battles. For example, there is a world to explore, and as you visit different towns you pick up quests and companions, and between the quests and the ensuing battles, you gain experience and levels.
Each time you gain a level, you also gain four skill points. All four classes have the same skills available to them, so you can build up your character however you want, but the different skills have different costs depending on the class you’re playing. For example, knights only have to spend one point to advance their (battle) skill (which increases how much damage they do when matching skulls), but wizards have to pay three points for the skill. However, these costs are reversed for the (earth mastery) skill (which influences how much mana you get for matching green symbols), and so the classes balance out.
In something of a nod to the
Warlords games (which were created by the same developer), you can also capture towns and purchase town upgrades. You’re given a (citadel) in your starting town, and once you’ve built a dungeon there you’re allowed to capture enemies. If the enemy can be used as a mount (like a griffon or a giant rat) then you can train it and ride it when exploring the world. If the enemy is just a regular enemy, then you can potentially steal its spells and add them to your repertoire. Capturing enemies, training mounts, and stealing spells are all handled via (mini-games,) which are variations on the basic matching game. For example, when capturing enemies, the puzzle board doesn’t replenish itself when you match symbols, and your goal is to remove all of the symbols from the board.
You can also build a siege workshop in your citadel, which allows you to attack other towns. Battling a town is just like battling other enemies, except that towns usually have more hit points. If you manage to capture the town, then you can visit your citadel while in the town, and the town will also provide you with some taxes each month. Money is important in the game, because you can use it to shop for equipment (such the life-saving Ultimate Troll Ring), and you can also use it to advance your skills.
The role-playing aspects of Puzzle Quest aren’t all that sophisticated. You’re probably not going to agonize over how to develop your character or about which items you should wear, and while you can make a few decisions during the course of the campaign, they’re well short of the complexity of the ones from The Witcher. For example, at one point somebody gives you a quest to retrieve an artifact, and you’re given the option of keeping it instead of handing it in.
The story elements are also a little basic, and it seems like the game’s developers just sort of plucked names and ideas from a variety of sources. The main enemy in the campaign is the god Bane (Forgotten Realms), you meet a minotaur named Tauron (World of Warcraft), you have to retrieve the pieces of a god that were scattered by his brother (Egyptian mythology), dwarves speak with a Scottish brogue (every fantasy setting ever created), and more. But the story elements are casual and usually offbeat, and they work well enough.
The silver lining to the previous two paragraphs is that a casual game with basic role-playing game elements sort of works as a primer for role-playing games. If you have somebody in your family who plays casual games but who hasn’t yet tried a role-playing game, then you might want to give them Puzzle Quest and see how it goes. If they like having an avatar and building up stats and finding equipment and going on quests, then they might be ready to (move up) to a full role-playing game (like the original Baldur’s Gate) or maybe something like one of the Heroes of Might and Magic games.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Puzzle Quest. It’s definitely a bargain-priced casual game — it’s lacking enough variety to support its 40-hour campaign, it’s a little unbalanced (I went 284-9 in the battles), and it’s missing lots of bells and whistles like, oh, 3D graphics and voice acting — but as long as those sorts of things don’t bother you, then the game can be a lot of fun. Puzzle Quest is definitely a cut above the other matching games that I’ve reviewed, and it has a great addictive drawing power that keeps you playing for one more quest and one more battle. Usually, hybrid games that combine basic elements of two genres don’t turn out very well, but Puzzle Quest is an exception to the rule, and it’s easily worth its $10-20 price.
