Addiction of Galactic Proportions
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix improves the scale, the scope and a bit of the tedium of its fantasy sibling.
Published: June 28, 2009
Though crew selection isn't all that important, building up your ship most definitely is. The need to load out your starting ship with the right weapons is almost as important as picking where you're supposed to go next (the sci-fi-lite storyline tries to introduce some neat techno-lore and alien races into things, but it all felt rather trite to me). In this way, there's a very real sense that if you're stuck somewhere, you can simply drop it and come back once you've gotten a little more oomph behind your weapons slots.
Battles can be won on the back of just matching up some luckily-deposited, big damage hexes, but it felt to me like building up a ship and properly upgrading the on-board weaponry was just as important to strategically whittling down the enemy. In the original Puzzle Quest, I almost never touched my spells because my turn was usually better spent damaging the enemy with the on-field matches lest they do it to me first. This time, with more options in the way things slid in and around, I felt there was more flexibility in how a battle could be carried out. I even spent more time just matching up extra experience or resources.
The galactic economy actually means resources (particularly stuff mined from asteroids through, you guessed it, more matching) have varying worth depending on where you are. You can schlep stuff from one resource-starved galaxy to another, but because your ship has a limited amount of storage, sacrifices have to be made -- at least until you've progressed enough to go with a ship made for hauling. The variety in ships means you can actually stock three of 'em to satisfy different roles (scouting, full-on ass kicking, transport), and it adds yet another wrinkle to the game's strategic advancement.
I'd love to say Galactrix is a pretty game, particularly with all the nebulae, the rather epic orchestral score and the variety of races, but to be perfectly honest, I still feel like some of the artwork for the characters is a bit... simplistic. The backgrounds are often wonderfully detailed, but the characters themselves can come off as an art student's portfolio rather than a big budget game. The interface, sound effects and bits of voiceover help prop it all up a little more, but there's still an unshakable feeling that the art is sort of the weak link in the presentation. Thankfully, I'm a sucker for moody, downright inspirational bits of brassy swell and orchestral meanderings, so the audio as a whole doesn't feel anywhere near as amateurish. It's a little weird that the audio balance is off, though, as that music I'm so fond of seems to swallow up some of the other sound effects and voices -- even in the office 5.1 setup.
Though it doesn't quite hit with the same "oh my god, why can't I stop playing this?!" addictive qualities as the first Puzzle Quest, Galactrix is still one of the deepest, lengthiest, most engrossing marriages of casual and hardcore gameplay available on the PS3 right now. In some cases, what was old has been made new again, and even with a feeling of general familiarity, there's more to Galactrix than just swapping out the fantasy skin for a sci-fi one. All that means is even if you think you're done matching things up, you'll get sucked right back in for seconds now that there's enough difference between the games. Why are you still reading this? Go, buy, go!
