Bejeweled + RPG = Addiction
Puzzle Quest will kick your ass and you'll love every second of it. Trust us.
Published: April 16, 2007
In fact, the depth of the game is one of the biggest attractors beyond the battles themselves. You can siege nearly all the major stops on the world map, though the fights are understandably even harder than normal enemies and even some bosses, but if you capture it, you can collect cash every in-game month, but run the risk that the denizens might revolt and you'll have to recapture things. At all of these places, you can build add-ons to learn spells from captured enemies, level up mounts, boost your own abilities and so on.
It's the former two that offer one of the cooler parts of the game. To actually capture an enemy, you'll have to fight them in a simple puzzle that you can retry as many times as needed, but must clear all jewels by the end. To level up a captured enemy that can be used as a mount to scoot around the map more quickly, you have to fight that creature again with increasingly smaller windows to act per turn and increasingly more powerful enemies. Both are great little tweaks to the main mode, and help extend what is already addictive into something that actually yields benefits.
That's actually the attraction right there. No matter what you're doing in the game, you're not just playing a Bejeweled clone, you're earning money or experience or unlocking more spells or capturing enemies or... well, you get the idea. I can't believe nobody thought to link such strong RPG and even light real-time strategy upgrade trees to a puzzle game, but I'm oh so glad it finally happened.
And, y'know, it's a case of the gameplay and actual game design being the attraction here. It's a puzzle game, so I doubt anyone was expecting killer visuals (though if you've played much of the PSP version, it's hard not to snicker at the DS one; touch screen controls can't make up for a cluttered screen and crap framerate while moving things). What you get is a puzzle field that has big, clean, smooth-moving icons.
Tapping the L/R Buttons lets you access either your own or the enemy's spells for examination with a press of the Triangle Button, and the X Button highlights an icon to move it with the d-pad, but otherwise there's really little more to interacting with the game. That's probably a good thing as the rest of the game is told with slightly... well, let's call them basic looking 2D illustrations of the vaguely generic fantasy persuasion.
This is doubly true for the music, which is really just a handful of lightly Celtic, folksy stuff you'd hear at a renaissance faire (and that's not a bad thing, as it fits the style of the game perfectly). Outside of the tunes, you'll really only get the occasional quip for your efforts in the game (the aforementioned Heroic Effort), the clack of jewels hitting each other, the sound of coins falling and the odd whoosh or lighting strike/explosion. Again, it's a puzzle game, though, so it's hard to want more.
There's no getting around it; Puzzle Quest takes pleasure in capitalizing on nearly every possible move on the board. In a lot of cases, this makes you a better player (and there is an Ad Hoc multiplayer mode to prove it, though we sadly could only find a single copy of the game and we lament the absence of Infrastructure play), but that doesn't mean that you aren't going to be crying bullshit when the game spanks you for a half-dozen moves in a row and halves your health. It doesn't matter, though, as the addiction is complete after just the first win, and that, friends, is why this game is crack.