Game Stooge

REVIEW: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (Nintendo DS)

• Scribbled on April 3rd, 2007 by Devin Grimes
• Filed in Nintendo DS, Puzzle, RPG, Reviews

Puzzle Quest is a handheld title that actually manages to tread some ground in the popular gaming trend of mashing together two beloved game styles that one wouldn’t ordinarily think would work successfully.

Picture a hybrid of two completely different game genres and you will get D3’s handheld adventure Puzzle Quest, which combines the strategic and fantasy elements of an RPG, and the formula of puzzle game classic Bejeweled. Sounds awkward, right? But, the strange thing is, the game actually plays out favorably.

The game pits you as a protagonist in a Middle Earth-esque environment where everything has gone awry. Ogres and Orcs are threatening the peace of mankind and you’re in charge of restoring order back to the world.

From the outset, you can pick from a variety of classes, however you’re race cannot be changed from human. Present are all the standard role playing classes such as: Druid, Knight, Warrior, and Wizard–all doing basically the same tasks you would imagine them to. For this review I played through the game as a Knight.

To get this out of the way: I am really in no way a fan of RPG games, but this game has pretty much consumed my life over the past few days. The RPG elements presented in the game are heavily present in the pure fantasy land story filled with orcs, elves, dwarves, and ogres, as well as magic present all throughout the land.

Movement throughout the terrain is provided by touching the area (usually a castle or building) that you want to go to and getting quests from either a King, Queen, or a friend/enemy looking for some help. The frontend is very much like Super Mario 3, in that the movement is really nothing more than to get into the level or battle in this case.

So, how’s the gameplay work? This Penny Arcade strip pretty much sums it up much more humorously than I ever could:

You battle your foes basically by playing Bejeweled. There are several icons that you have to match in groups of three or more, and each has a different effect on you or your enemy. There are three types of Mana (points which let you cast spells) that you can match up (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow) that will help you cast spells to either damage your enemy, heal yourself, or get yourself another turn. To deal damage, you can either select from a number of spells on the side of the screen (permitted you have enough Mana), or match up three or more skulls. You can also collect experience points and gold by matching those up as well.

Throughout the game, by beating enemies and completing tasks you will net yourself some serious experience points, which in turn, will level up your character. As you level up, you’ll increase your skills and spell abilities to ensure complete and utter destruction of your enemies. You can also purchase add-ons to your empire buildings to imprison foes and mounts to learn new abilities from them.

But, Puzzle Quest ultimately suffers from the fate that many RPGs have fallen into: grinding. From the outset of the game, enemies are tough (although they do scale to your level) and you don’t really have too many skills and abilities. So you’re constantly driving to increase your level, but eventually that drive starts to plateau a little bit. You’ll run across enemies that are just in your way, that are no problem to defeat, but they take up precious amounts of time, artificially lengthening the time it takes to complete the game.

One other problem I ran into (in the DS version) was the user interface. The game controls solely with the stylus, and is really unforgiving when you accidentally touch the wrong piece. Each grid is roughly one square centimeter which leaves plenty of room for mistakes.

Puzzle Quest is still an immensely fun game though, especially given the circumstances the game was birthed into. Many games try to combine the best of all the genres and ultimately fail, but Puzzle Quest will give those developers hope that a cross genre hybrid can indeed be successful. If you’re into Bejeweled-style gameplay, or really into RPGs, the game is worth checking out.

Still not sure about this game? Go ahead and download the free PC demo here.

Note: This review is solely based on the Nintendo DS version of the game.