Puzzle Quest - Bejeweled meets RPG

A glance at the name would make you start thinking what could possibly make someone play a game like this. Well, to be completely honest with you, its a decently fun game. Its complex and its stupidly imbalanced. Most of the game is about luck. Like playing dice poker in The Witcher and getting your ass beat kind of luck. When first starting the game you can directly jump into the combat or create a story character. Jump into combat is like playing vs against other players or just fighting monsters. If you start a story there is actually a vast and interesting world to explore and play around in. The world map reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics where you move around your cursor and click and your character moves to designated stepping points. You can enter cities go to old fields you been to and fight enemies to train. There is also a complicated city building thing that I didn't understand and gave up.

The game play requires you to run around doing errands with side quests and a main story quest marked in a red ! instead of a yellow !. Combat is played like bejeweled. There are different blocks, red, blue, green, yellow are mana blocks. Matching them will add into the mana pool of the specific color. Different classes take advantage of different pools. For example a Wizard focuses on red and yellow while a Druid focuses on green and blue. Then there are skulls, purple stars, and gold. Skulls means you attack it is based on your weapon damage, while purple stars are exp and gold is well, gold. You take turns to match. If you know you can get something but leaves yourself vulnerable to a skull or letting the guy charge up his red mana that he needs to do a super skill, you might leave that one alone and let him grab it instead.

When you first play the game you can pick between a few different classes each with their own unique skills, strengths and weaknesses. You then pick a premade avatar which will show up in all the talking scenes as well as your character screen and combat. Not knowing what to do I asked my sister to pick one and she picked the green hair wizard girl so thats what I went with. The classes are as follows:

Druid - Focuses on messing up the field and disrupting the enemy. Completely useless class except for one stupid exploitable spell that lets you one shot everything to death instantly.

Knight - They focus on getting a lot of exp and they get it fast! But other than that you are just a really defensive loser that can't kill.

Warrior - You build damage and you destroy people. The strongest and easiest class in the game.

Wizard - Your spells do decent damage early on but when you get higher the spells do shit and you have to abuse a skill to do any kind of damage.

As you can see here the classes are badly balanced. Wizard being probably the most balanced of them all but requires you to build specifically for a Hand of Power build. How this works is every time you match skulls. you deal damage but when you use skills to blow up skulls it will always do 1 damage. 1 damage does not get boosted by weapon and gear boosts. So what you do is, cast Hand of Power which will always add +2 damage to any damage done. So blowing up a skull instead of doing 1 damage will be doing say 8-9 damage a hit making your damage go up very fast. Its not stupidly overpowered like a druid but it puts you on equal footing with other classes.

There is a lot to do in the game, you can buy gear, craft, learn new skills, get mounts with special effects, bring companions, have captives, build kingdoms, follow rumors, and a shit load of stuff. What I'm getting at is this game is very complex. Its also brutal when luck isn't on your side and you see the enemy matching 5 in a row multiple times and you go from full health to zero after one lucky streak by the enemy when you spent the last 5-10 minutes whittling down his health. Often I need to fight the same fights multiple times because of terrible luck. You can however pick your difficulty. I picked normal but for masochists and noobies there are hard and easy modes for you. You can even pick limited time option so you have to make yourself match faster or it'll skip your turn and hurt you. If you accidentally mess up a move it will say "invalid move" and deal damage to you then skip your turn so the enemy can damage you more and kill you. Its merciless.

While the puzzle combat is the only "puzzle" part of the game the rest of the game plays like any other RPG. Theres a main story that you follow. You're a wizard of some Queen and she sends you on a mission to find out why undead are popping up you meet people along the way beat up a few necromancers here and there and gives you decisions that branch the story out a little bit come back and realize necromancers are the least of your concern. I haven't finished the game but from what I can see I'm not very far in. One thing I should mention is the text in this game is fucking tiny. I play on the PS2 version and holy fuck is it small. I have to strain my eyes to read this and I could read King's Bounty fine on the PC when everyone says the text is small there. Its smaller in Puzzle Quest and maybe its because its on the TV but its like a grain of sand.

If you're a RPG fan or a puzzle fan or just someone looking for something to waste your time on, try this game out. The game is frustrating and it cheats but its just the right amount that you don't want to give up and try again, and again, and again. You might hear the voice "you have suffered defeat" over and over in your head at night when you're trying to sleep but give it a chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgxxrHCJ6xM