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Puzzle Quest - Challenge of the Warlords: Reviews

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Game Score: 7/10

Warlords Puzzle Quest. Seeing this game made me scratch my head for a few minutes. The fact that the company that had most previously stuck to gritty high-fantasy strategy games was delving into a cartoonish puzzle game for their first step into the handheld market honestly blew my mind.

The game itself plays a lot like the cellphone classic "Bejeweled" - move one gem at a time, trying to line up 3 or more. Drop rows to make combos and score big points. Simple enough. Except this game takes it one step further: these same actions are now a duel between you and a mighty pile of monsters, ranging from goblins, to giants and dragons, with other adventurers and giant spiders in between. Giant spiders are important to fantasy games, don't ask why.

So, the principle is still the same - move a gem, line up 3+ of the same color (red, yellow, blue, green), get points. Except now you and your opponent take turns moving pieces on the same board. The "points" you get are based on the colors of the gems you break, and serve as mana to fuel special abilities that let you really put the hurt on. "But how do I put the regular hurt on" you ask? Let me tell you.

Also on the board are skulls, gold, and purple stars that (hopefully) you can line up the same way as the mana gems. These however don't give you mana, the stars are bonus XP (yes you level up in a puzzle game, and its nothing like leveling up tetris), gold gives you gold (HURRRR) which you can use to buy new equipment or upgrade your citadel, and the skulls fuel your war effort - by dealing direct damage to your opponent.

I know I havn't explained a lot in this brief review, which goes a long way towards showing off this games greatest strength: the mount of depth it has in comparison to other puzzle games. Character progression feels about like the pace of a CCG - get a new ability and find a way to make it work into a combo - your playing rhythm and style would dictate just how that would be.

The greatest flaw of the game is that in being a puzzle game it revolves around one thing more than any other, and thats luck. Its totally possible for pieces to fall in patterns that give you or your opponent a massive advantage, or disadvantage. I've seen multiple games where a quarter of my life was gone before I even got to make a move - the computer opened up with some "EXTRA TURN EXTRA TURN EXTRA TURN" combo. Mostly I'd just roll my eyes at those. At least you still get xp when you die.

I'm going to call it a 7 out of 10. +for being Warlords, +for character progression, -for being luck based.