GregHowley.com

I'm nearly finished with my first run-through of Puzzle Quest, and I've got to say: It's a great game. It's the only game I've really played on my DS since I got it. No MarioKart, no Advance Wars, no Final Fantasy 4.

For those of you not in the know, Puzzle Quest is a mashup of a puzzle game and a RPG. On the surface, it's a fairly simplistic RPG. You travel around, getting quests, fighting monsters, getting experience and gold, and buying better weapons and armor. The main difference is that every time you get into a fight, you battle your enemy by playing a two-player version of Bejeweled.

You can choose from one of four character classes: Fighter, Knight, Wizard, and Druid. Each character has a number of special abilities, each of which uses differing amounts of colored mana. Matching red, green, blue, or yellow gems gets you an equivalent amount of that colored mana, which can be used to invoke your special abilities. You take turns with your opponent, matching gems in turn. If you match four, you get an extra turn. If you match five, you get an extra turn and create a wildcard gem. There are also skulls, stars, and gold. Matching skulls damages your foe, matching stars nets you experience points, and matching gold gets you... gold. If at any point there are no more possible matches on the screen, both players lose all their mana of all colors and the board resets.

There's actually a lot of strategy in the way you line up subsequent moves and in the way you use your abilities. Some abilities may make your opponent lose turns, destroy entire rows or columns of gems, change the color of gems, or create skulls.

This in itself would make for a decent game. The time I really started loving Puzzle Quest is when I bought a dungeon and started capturing foes. The capture puzzle game is entirely different than the battle puzzle game. When you elect to capture an opponent, you're given a screen full of gems, and as you match them, no new ones fall in from the top. You must match them in such a way that every single gem is gone at the end. If you succeed, you capture your foe. Some of these are really hard - I thought I'd never capture the Minotaur King.

If you capture certain creatures, you can then train them and ride them as mounts. I've ridden a giant spider, a sand worm, a hippogriff, and I'm currently riding a wyvern. The mount-training puzzle game is identical to the battle puzzle game, except it's timed. It's much tougher to make a good move when you've only got ten seconds to do it. But as you continue to train your mount to higher levels, the mount will grant you improved bonuses. Each mount also grants you one special ability.

When you capture enemies that can't be mounted, you can force them to teach you their abilities. For example, I forced an orc to teach me the headbutt skill, and forced a sand worm to teach me the swallow whole skill. It was pretty funny when I used swallow whole on a magical catapult I was fighting. What kind of indigestion did I get from that?

The Research Spell (learn new ability) puzzle game is probably my favorite in all of Puzzle Quest. In this game, there is no opponent, so you can better set future moves up for yourself without fear of your opponent taking advantage of those five-gem combos. Of course, neither can you use your special abilities when researching spells. To successfully research a spell, you must match a certain amount of each color, depending on the spell you're researching and its difficulty. You must also match a certain number of scrolls. Scrolls don't appear on their own - they're only created when you match four or five gems in a row. And if you run out of moves, you lose. Some of these get really hard. Just when you think you're almost done, you run out of moves and lose.

You can also seige towns once you buy seige equipment, which is exactly like any other battle, but against a super-overpowered boss enemy. Some of the special abilities used by towns you're invading are pretty devastating. And it's really strange when you accept a quest from the leader of a town, then beseige and conquer the town, then complete the quest and talk to the town's leader who takes no notice of the fact that you've singlehandedly conquered his town. But the funniest is when I used the headbutt ability against a town I was seiging. I headbutted an entire town! I ran out to tell Linda what I'd done, but she just shook her head and rolled her eyes.

The last of the puzzle games is the one in which you forge new items. And although it's very similar to the spell research game, it's somehow much less fun. You need to match certain amounts of each color, plus a certain number of anvils. And anytime you match anvils, the board resets, which can sometimes be a blessing, and sometimes be really annoying. You can find runes all over the map in Puzzle Quest, and mix and match those runes to create different items. Sadly, all the items that you can potentially make are pretty much useless.

My first run-through of the game, I'm playing a fighter that I named Assface. I've captured every creature possible for me to capture right now, and I've conquered every town on my map. The level 30 fighter ability Deathbringer, which creates skulls depending on how much red mana you currently have, makes the game almost too easy. It can do upwards of 100 damage per use, and since using it generally causes at least one 4-of-a-kind match, you can use it multiple times. The only trick is working myself up to fifty or so red mana before I use it.

I think I'll try a Wizard on my second playthrough. The lower hit points should make it more challenging, and I'll bet a wizard gets some pretty cool spells.