Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords Review
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In something of a nod to the Warlords games (which were created by the same developer), you can also capture towns and purchase town upgrades. You're given a (citadel) in your starting town, and once you've built a dungeon there you're allowed to capture enemies. If the enemy can be used as a mount (like a griffon or a giant rat) then you can train it and ride it when exploring the world. If the enemy is just a regular enemy, then you can potentially steal its spells and add them to your repertoire. Capturing enemies, training mounts, and stealing spells are all handled via (mini-games,) which are variations on the basic matching game. For example, when capturing enemies, the puzzle board doesn't replenish itself when you match symbols, and your goal is to remove all of the symbols from the board. You can also build a siege workshop in your citadel, which allows you to attack other towns. Battling a town is just like battling other enemies, except that towns usually have more hit points. If you manage to capture the town, then you can visit your citadel while in the town, and the town will also provide you with some taxes each month. Money is important in the game, because you can use it to shop for equipment (such the life-saving Ultimate Troll Ring), and you can also use it to advance your skills.
The role-playing aspects of Puzzle Quest aren't all that sophisticated. You're probably not going to agonize over how to develop your character or about which items you should wear, and while you can make a few decisions during the course of the campaign, they're well short of the complexity of the ones from The Witcher. For example, at one point somebody gives you a quest to retrieve an artifact, and you're given the option of keeping it instead of handing it in.
The story elements are also a little basic, and it seems like the game's developers just sort of plucked names and ideas from a variety of sources. The main enemy in the campaign is the god Bane (Forgotten Realms), you meet a minotaur named Tauron (World of Warcraft), you have to retrieve the pieces of a god that were scattered by his brother (Egyptian mythology), dwarves speak with a Scottish brogue (every fantasy setting ever created), and more. But the story elements are casual and usually offbeat, and they work well enough.
The silver lining to the previous two paragraphs is that a casual game with basic role-playing game elements sort of works as a primer for role-playing games. If you have somebody in your family who plays casual games but who hasn't yet tried a role-playing game, then you might want to give them Puzzle Quest and see how it goes. If they like having an avatar and building up stats and finding equipment and going on quests, then they might be ready to (move up) to a full role-playing game (like the original Baldur's Gate) or maybe something like one of the Heroes of Might and Magic games.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Puzzle Quest. It's definitely a bargain-priced casual game -- it's lacking enough variety to support its 40-hour campaign, it's a little unbalanced (I went 284-9 in the battles), and it's missing lots of bells and whistles like, oh, 3D graphics and voice acting -- but as long as those sorts of things don't bother you, then the game can be a lot of fun. Puzzle Quest is definitely a cut above the other matching games that I've reviewed, and it has a great addictive drawing power that keeps you playing for one more quest and one more battle. Usually, hybrid games that combine basic elements of two genres don't turn out very well, but Puzzle Quest is an exception to the rule, and it's easily worth its $10-20 price.
