Lemon Drop: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for XBL
In what marks a first actual purchase of an XBL game for me, I’ve been spending some time with a little game called Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. Playing “proper” games requires lengthier blocks of time than my schedule has been allowing lately, so I thought I’d give some lighter fare a shot. Gotta feed that sucking feeling of gaming hunger somehow!
Puzzle Quest is one of those “take a puzzle game and cross it with a wooly mammoth” affairs, where a puzzle game (usually featuring some colored gems) is forced to fornicate with another genre such as fighting to produce something like Super Puzzle Fighter. In this case, “the wooly mammoth” is actually the RPG genre, and so Puzzle Quest takes you on a classic role-playing adventure where you travel from place to place completing assignments for your beloved Princess in a quest to save the kingdom from the threat of the Undead. Conversations and cutscenes are presented using an attractive selection of still artwork and, where in a traditional RPG you’d pull out your sword or prepare to apply some battle polish to your trusty wand, in Puzzle Quest you instead challenge your enemies to a competitive puzzle game. Ghandi would be proud.
Puzzle fanatics have invariably seen this flavor of puzzle in some shape or form before: you are faced with a board full of colored gems, and your goal is to swap the position of nearby gems in such a way as to line up 3 or more of the same color in a row, horizontally or vertically. Puzzle Quest dutifully adds some RPG flavor to this simple scenario: one type of gem is a skull gem, and lining up 3 or more of those will take hit points away from your opponent. Lining up other types of gems will either add money to your purse or fill up different color magic gauges. Depending on how you created your character (your choices include some typical RPG-style classes), you will have access to various flavors of spells, which consume the various magic points when cast. As might be expected, some spells do direct damage to your opponent, while others are defensive, effect the playing field, or provide different types of bonuses tied to actions happening on the board.
You and your enemy take turns (unless you manage to line up 4 or more gems in a row, in which case you get a free turn), and you are playing on the same board, so strategy is important. The ability to use a spell rather than take a turn adds a nice wrinkle to the strategy; you can use this in the case when there are few favorable moves left on the board, and you’d like to force your opponent to make a bad move rather than have to make it yourself.
Puzzle Quest adds even more RPG elements to the mix besides spells. You can use money gained from lining up money gems (or from completing quests) to purchase various pieces of armor and weapons; upgrade your stats to gain more life points and add power to your spells; build up your own citadel where you can research additional spells, craft special items and more; and you can even add members to your party which will provide benefits when fighting certain types of enemies. Overall, the puzzle and the RPG have clearly had some rather thorough and steamy sex here, and the offspring definitely feels like a fully integrated product of the two, possessing two equally committed and involved parents.
That said, there will likely still be players who’ll want to skip all the chit chat and other RPG trimmings and get straight to the addictive puzzle action. Thankfully, Puzzle Quest lets you do just that if that’s your fancy: you can go straight to the arcade action, vs. the computer, a second player, or via Xbox Live. If you are like me, you might try to use the two-player mode to get your significant other involved in the gaming process. In my case this was met with limited success, since my wife, who likes puzzle games but is otherwise as non-hardcore a gamer as one can possibly imagine, wasn’t too taken with all the RPG-inspired modifications to the gameplay. She scoffed at the idea of being able to use spells - something about people shamelessly bastardizing a good puzzle game. The only way I was able to get her to play is by promising not to use magic at all and stick to the core puzzle gameplay only.
While your mileage with the wife (or other significant other) may vary, overall Puzzle Quest is quite an enjoyable affair if you like puzzle games and don’t mind a little RPG makeup on top. To say that the RPG element really transforms this game into some kind of new experience wouldn’t be quite true; it largely remains a decoration on top of the core puzzle game, but it’s a pretty darn nice decoration nonetheless.
Grade: 8.8/10
