As a huge fan of the original Puzzle Quest and it’s successor, Galactrix, I was intrigued to see a game from PQ‘s lead designer, Steve Fawkner show up on May’s review calendar. After initially thinking that the game would be too complicated for my reviewing tastes (I tend to like games that don’t require a lot of brains when reviewing them for fear I’m missing some subtle nuances on account of being an idiot), my editor asked me to review it.  The game isn’t out yet, but a demo is and I fired it up last night.

Brains be damned.  Holy crap, I want to play this game.

Now, I’m sure that at this point, I should point out all of my journalistic neutrality and professionalism seeing how I’m going to be reviewing the thing, but I say fuck that.  I review games because I love games and I find nothing wrong with showing an enthusiasm for an interesting title.  My editor would, no doubt, disagree as I have been chided in the past for being overly enthusiastic when dealing with PR.  Whatever.  I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with telling people that you’ve enjoyed their past work.  I still play the games and review them as I see fit.  But I digress.

Puzzle Kingdoms feels more like a successor to Puzzle Quest than Galactrix did despite Galactrix’s changes to the formula.  For all that Galactrix changed though, it still had a Puzzle Quest in space feel to it.  Instead of spells you had weapons and you could mix and match them as needed.  You still matched gems, only they flew in from different directions.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but the changes to the game seem to have come about as a result of the change in setting rather than a desire to drive the genre forward.

Yes, I’m using the word genre.  I’m not sure how many games one needs to make a genre official but now the matching gems as combat style of games has Puzzle Quest, Galactrix, Puzzle Kingdoms and Henry Hatsworth under it’s tent, I’m calling it a genre.  I’m groundbreaking like that.

Any who, in Puzzle Kingdoms the goal is to do battle with other forces by means of matching tiles.  How the matches are made makes up a key difference here though.  When you’re in battle, you match tiles by taking a symbol and pushing it on to the game board, at the top/bottom of a column or beginning/end of a row.  The column/row will then move in the appropriate direction to accommodate your new tile.  As you can see all of the options for adding new symbols to the board, as well as the matches your opponent needs to make, you have a lot more control over denying them matches as well as making beneficial matches for yourself.  They can see the board too though, so you do have to be thinking ahead.  Something I rarely do, to the detriment of plenty of dead peasants and soldiers.

Matches can be made in matches of three or more in a line, or three or more in an L shape.  No diagonals here, which is fine with me as it’s complicated enough.  Combat tiles can be matched to do damage, but the majority of your destructive force is going to come from your troops.  Puzzle Kingdoms doesn’t have spells like Puzzle Quest did, although it does have spells, instead you recruit troops from the various bits of real estate you conquer.

Troops cost varying amounts of money, do varying amounts of damage and have differing power up requirements.  When you make a match, if the match is needed to power up a troop, they’ll get say, one of three symbols filled in.  Once all symbols are filled in, they can attack and you can either attack at your next round, or hoard your attack.  It’s similar to the notion of using color matches to fuel spells or weapons in the previous PQ games but with two major differences.

The first difference is that if you are able to get more than one troop fully powered up, when you attack you’ll attack with both troops as well as an added bonus.  This would be the reward part of hoarding your attacks.  The risk part is your second difference.  Troops can be killed and if they’re killed, you lose the ability to attack.  Sure, you can still match attack tiles to do damage, but if you want to attack with a troop, you’ll have to get one powered up all over again.

The ability for your enemy to essentially destroy all of your weapons adds a real nice twist to the gameplay. You can retreat at any time if you’re getting your behind handed to you, and go recruit more troops, however all of your progress in the battle is lost.  Similarly, if all of your troops die, then it’s back to the map with you.  Recruiting more troops to replace those fallen in battle costs money, money won during battles, however if you don’t have enough money to recruit troops and there’s still real estate on the map to conquer, well, it’s game over for you.

Your troops are all under the command of a hero, and it’s the hero that you work towards leveling up.  Leveling them up gives combat and defense bonuses to your troops as well as the ability to cast spells during battle so you want to make sure you’re making the right choice for your hero but at the same time, you need to make sure that you’re bringing the right mix of troops into battle with you.  It sounds complicated, and when I first started playing I thought I had waded right into it, but it all comes together very smoothly.

Now, these are all impressions from a demo, and  things could very well go right off the rails as the game progresses, but so far, there’s a very solid gameplay framework there.  The game has the standard “two pictures talking to each other” method of storytelling common to both Puzzle Quest and Galactrix and I must admit, I’m a bit tired of it, but at the same time, I’d rather the time be spent on making sure that the gameplay is up to par.

The game certainly seems like it will be a lot more complicated than either of the previous Puzzle Quest games, with choices in which hero to use, which weapons to use, which troops to recruit which I think will be a welcome change, despite my initial misgivings.  In Galactrix, I once I found a weapon loadout that worked, well I stuck with it because I got very good results with it.   The game never made me switch up my tactics all that much.  As long as I kept leveling up, and bought ships with more cargo space as money allowed, I was good to go.  I can already see that Puzzle Kingdoms has the potential of hammering you for such lethargy.  Even the simple choice of which troops to recruit, the cheap, peasants or the beefier, yet more expensive swordsmen makes me spend more time preparing for battle than either PQ games ever did.

So far, I’m quite excited for the game, and the fact that the demo runs smoothly on my aging laptop doesn’t hurt, I just hope that the full release lives up to the demo.  It will be interesting to see where Infinite Interactive goes after this one, as the resource management aspect of the game has somewhat of an RTS feel to it.  You could very easily take the game and make it into an Advanced Wars type of affair, only without the need for proper troop placement.  At any rate, I know I’ll be keeping an eye on what they’ve got cooking.  Two good games and a high potential for a third tends to spark my interest.

The game ships in May for the Wii and the DS.   A PC date has yet to be released.