Think It Through
PQ2 will make your brain hurt, but you won't be able to stop.
Published: June 24, 2007
People often reduce the PSP to some kind of port-heavy joke system, but like all PlayStation systems, there are random publishers that will take a chance and release something unique amidst the flurry of familiar names. D3Publisher managed to garner arguably the biggest sleeper hit so far this year with Puzzle Quest, but they had a mildly popular (and surprisingly good) puzzler a year before in the form of PQ: Practical Intelligence Quotient, a little mind bender the revolved around pushing blocks.
A year later and Japanese developer NowProduction has pumped out a sequel that's more bite-sized, offers a handful of new additions and offers near-unlimited replay thanks to Infrastructure online downloads. Oh, and it's still tough. Really tough, in fact, but it's that kind of challenge that makes you want to figure it out. I can only imagine it triggers the same "okay, I'm this close to figuring it out" feeling that Sudoku puzzles do in me. Whatever the cause, the effect that of one of the best puzzle games on the PSP, and considering Sony's little portable offering is anything but short on good puzzlers, that's one hell of an accomplishment.
Not a ton has changed to the core formula. You still scoot around a handful of ultra-minimalist mazes pushing and pulling rectangular blocks or picking up square ones. Detectives that will follow your footprints, cops that will track you down, glass blocks that shatter if you drop them from more than a block's height and let lasers pass through them, colored switches that are a little more diabolical this time around are the biggest changes, but at the core, it's still about getting from the starting point to the end using as few moves as possible by the time limit (ooh, did we forget they added that too? Whoops, yeah, you only have five hours to finish the main test to get a proper PQ score).
At least this time around complaints about the absolute marathon that was the first 100 puzzle test to determine your PQ were listened to. There are far more bite-sized options this time, around, including a simple, pared down test that will give you results in just 5 random puzzles to finish in 10 minutes, a set of "themed" puzzles that are extra hard or can be finished in a single move, downloadable weekly tests or even puzzles uploaded by other PQ2 users that you can download and rate.
It's the online features that really give the game legs, though. While it's entirely possible that it'll take weeks of trying and retrying the 250-plus pre-designed ones, with the weekly additions from the development team, plus the user-created content (which, again, can be voted on and categorized if you have a favorite type), the game will literally offer you something new until there are no more people playing and creating stuff for it, and given the steady trickle of content that I saw while checking online, that might be a while.
It took a while for me to get this review up, and part of me wants to just gush for hours on end about how smoothly the difficulty ramps up from something that requires 30 seconds of experimentation to something that takes 30 minutes of staring just to find the right first move, or how awesome all the online stuff is, but the bottom line is just that it's an incredibly addictive, welcome addition to the PSP library. The fact that I kept wanting to go back and beat the damn main test before reviewing it just so I'd have a nice sense of accomplishment (I still haven't, by the way) says something about how well designed it all is.
Bottom line: if you like brain teasers, you need to get this game. It'll give your noodle the best workout in ages, forcing you to think in three dimensions, and if you feel like making your own puzzles to torment others, you can do that too. With absolutely phenomenal replay value and a rock-solid set of initial on-disc offerings, PQ2 is one of the best bangs for your buck you're going to find on the PSP.
A year later and Japanese developer NowProduction has pumped out a sequel that's more bite-sized, offers a handful of new additions and offers near-unlimited replay thanks to Infrastructure online downloads. Oh, and it's still tough. Really tough, in fact, but it's that kind of challenge that makes you want to figure it out. I can only imagine it triggers the same "okay, I'm this close to figuring it out" feeling that Sudoku puzzles do in me. Whatever the cause, the effect that of one of the best puzzle games on the PSP, and considering Sony's little portable offering is anything but short on good puzzlers, that's one hell of an accomplishment.
Not a ton has changed to the core formula. You still scoot around a handful of ultra-minimalist mazes pushing and pulling rectangular blocks or picking up square ones. Detectives that will follow your footprints, cops that will track you down, glass blocks that shatter if you drop them from more than a block's height and let lasers pass through them, colored switches that are a little more diabolical this time around are the biggest changes, but at the core, it's still about getting from the starting point to the end using as few moves as possible by the time limit (ooh, did we forget they added that too? Whoops, yeah, you only have five hours to finish the main test to get a proper PQ score).
At least this time around complaints about the absolute marathon that was the first 100 puzzle test to determine your PQ were listened to. There are far more bite-sized options this time, around, including a simple, pared down test that will give you results in just 5 random puzzles to finish in 10 minutes, a set of "themed" puzzles that are extra hard or can be finished in a single move, downloadable weekly tests or even puzzles uploaded by other PQ2 users that you can download and rate.
It's the online features that really give the game legs, though. While it's entirely possible that it'll take weeks of trying and retrying the 250-plus pre-designed ones, with the weekly additions from the development team, plus the user-created content (which, again, can be voted on and categorized if you have a favorite type), the game will literally offer you something new until there are no more people playing and creating stuff for it, and given the steady trickle of content that I saw while checking online, that might be a while.
It took a while for me to get this review up, and part of me wants to just gush for hours on end about how smoothly the difficulty ramps up from something that requires 30 seconds of experimentation to something that takes 30 minutes of staring just to find the right first move, or how awesome all the online stuff is, but the bottom line is just that it's an incredibly addictive, welcome addition to the PSP library. The fact that I kept wanting to go back and beat the damn main test before reviewing it just so I'd have a nice sense of accomplishment (I still haven't, by the way) says something about how well designed it all is.
Bottom line: if you like brain teasers, you need to get this game. It'll give your noodle the best workout in ages, forcing you to think in three dimensions, and if you feel like making your own puzzles to torment others, you can do that too. With absolutely phenomenal replay value and a rock-solid set of initial on-disc offerings, PQ2 is one of the best bangs for your buck you're going to find on the PSP.