Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Lee Evans

A couple of years ago, Infinite Interactive struck gold with Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords.  The combination of stat-building RPG and addictive puzzle game proved to be too much for gamers to ignore, and became a huge sleeper hit.  They went back to the well for the disappointing Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, and now they're shooting for another hit with Puzzle Kingdoms.

So does Puzzle Kingdoms provide a good experience?  Is it worth your money, or has the magic that created the original Puzzle Quest finally dissipated?  Is the shine off the concept?

First, Puzzle Kingdoms should be very familiar to anyone who's played Puzzle Quest.  You match up different colored jewels in order to collect magic.  You then use that magic power to defeat your foes and gain experience points from the battles.  Instead of levelling up your character, you're levelling up the various heroes who do your dirty work.  You equip those heroes with weapons, armor, and magic spells and give them soldiers to work with.  Each soldier has its own color, and if you match enough colored gems, they'll be able to unleash an attack of their own.

In most of the game, you're travelling from kingdom to kingdom, attacking the kingdom and moving from stronghold to stronghold.  In each stronghold, there are enemy soldiers that you must defeat in order to proceed to the next stronghold and take down the heroes of the kingdom.  Then, lather, rinse, repeat.  Go to the next kingdom and do the same thing.

It's worth noting that Puzzle Kingdoms is rather drab-looking and sometimes downright ugly.  For most of the game I used an elf hero, and he looked like he had lost a fistfight against Wolverine.  Seriously, it was that bad.  No one has any alternate facial expressions.  Grim determination is their only mask.  The soldiers you use are very pixelly, the maps are crudely drawn, and the backgrounds, while reasonably detailed, don't offer very many surprises.

The sound is also rather repetitive.  Every single soldier in your army screams "BURN!" when attacking.  Every single creature in your army makes a vaguely animalistic growl.  That's about it.  The music is quite good, but the rest feels like they didn't just mail it in, they put the sounds in an envelope, forgot about them on their desk for weeks, accidentally spilled coffee on it and let it get dusty until their wife nagged them into mailing it in.

In fact, that's how most everything feels in Puzzle Kingdoms.  The story is throwaway and many times downright ridiculous.  The puzzle matching is repetitive.  The only difference between unit types are their stats.  Every hero plays almost exactly the same.  The worst problem with Puzzle Kingdoms, though, is the inclusion of the worst feature from Puzzle Quest: Galactrix.  I'm talking about the equivalent of the endlessly tiring jumpgate puzzles.

For those who haven't played Galactrix, the jumpgate puzzles stopped you from getting to the next area by having you do an annoying puzzle with a time limit.  If you failed, them's the breaks.  Start over.  Puzzle Kingdoms does something similar, although they've toned it back to a more manageable level.  Once you defeat a kingdom, you must finish a puzzle to get to the next area.  You have to clear an entire board of gems in order to proceed, but here's the kicker:  When you clear a color of gem, it doesn't take that color off the board.  In other words, you may have one green gem left to clear, but there are absolutely no green gems left.  You have to send other blocks out to clear way for a green gem to MAYBE come up.  You have as much time as you need, but that doesn't make it any less annoying.

Also, Puzzle Kingdoms very quickly falls into repetitiveness.  Every single battle is the same.  Every single kingdom conquest is the same.  Sure, the hero of each kingdom might have some slightly different powers, but you're doing exactly the same thing in each combat.  You'll even have the first turn in every single fight.  There's barely any variety.  To be fair, at its heart, even a great game like Puzzle Quest was repetitive, but at least it felt like you were doing something different in each battle.  Here, you're quite literally repeating the same couple of battles over and over again.

In other words, Puzzle Kingdoms is a contrived mess of a game.  So why can't I stop playing it?

Believe me, I've tried putting this game down repeatedly.  I've tried totally walking away and I simply can't.  When I look for something to play, it ends up being the game I've been playing more often than not.  I don't have any idea why.  Maybe it's because puzzle gaming is inherently fun.  Maybe it's because I actually want to know how the ridiculous story ends.  Maybe I'm a masochist.  I don't know.  I wish I knew how to quit it.

For all of the mistakes that Puzzle Kingdoms piled on top of its concept, they really couldn't hide the fact that puzzle gaming is just plain fun.  I think they knew this, so they felt they could do something quickly and on the cheap.  I really don't want to encourage this behavior, but Puzzle Kingdoms could have been a lot, lot worse.

When trying to come up with the review for this game, I found myself scratching my head over what to say.  I mean, this game is cheaply made with some really bad design choices.  Still, I enjoyed it despite its myriad flaws.  So here's what I'll say: If you're not a fan of puzzle games, you won't like this one.  If you have only a passing interest in puzzle games, you might find Puzzle Kingdoms more frustrating than fun.  If you love puzzle games, are suffering from withdrawal and desperately need your fix, Puzzle Kingdoms should provide a good experience despite its obvious flaws.

Gaming Trend Score

69

1. Graphics: 55
2. Audio: 70
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 70
5. Value/Replay: 70
6. OVERALL:69