Review by: Brandon "Warbeast" Cackowski-Schnell

When you think of puzzle combat games, Infinite Interactive is the first development shop you think of, having pioneered the genre with Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. Since then the company has released several follow ups, all with the same Puzzle Noun nomenclature and all with the same basic structure of bloody, violent conflict represented with manipulation of colored bits. This is no different, however instead of working with the familiar match three structure you'll be working with a combination of Tetris Attacks and Bubble Bobble, a strange albeit satisfying combination.

There's no pesky character classes or character development to deal with in this outing. You're a barbarian whose tribe has been captured by slavers. After heading out from your village and stumbling across a warbeast trapped in a pit you're off to find the slavers and free your people. Along the way you're joined by a mysterious sorceress as well as a woman from your tribe. Oh, and let's not forget the warbeast. With a crew like this it's hard not to succeed especially with them all looking like they sprang from the pages of a seventh grader's math notebook. The less said about the visuals in this game the better.

As a barbarian thirsting for revenge you'll come across plenty of enemies to smite with your giant, falling blocks and plenty of battles to showcase the new puzzle combat system. Gone is the turn based system of previous games, replaced with a real time system that makes for some fast paced, frantic action. The battle board takes up the DS's bottom screen and is split in half with a movable, vertical bar. Blocks come in from the side, in columns of three and can be rotated to land either horizontally or vertically. As blocks come in, the key is to stack them so that you build chains of blocks of like colors. When an action block arrives in a column, matching it to a like color will destroy all chains of that color, filling the meter of your warbeast's attacks. If a rage gem (the usual skull gem) is part of the destroyed stack you'll build up your rage meter. Get enough rage and you'll attack your enemy, pushing the bar towards them.

In a nice twist, items such as weapons and shields can't be used at any time, they first have to be built by creating a four by four square of like gems and then destroyed via an action gem. Once you've done enough damage to move the bar close enough to your opponent to where they can't stack gems any more the battle is over. If it sounds complicated, trust me, it is, however it only takes a few battles for the intricacies of the system to fall into place.

As you progress through the game you'll have plenty of opportunities outside of battle to jack up both your barbarian's stats and your warbeast's attacks. Improving the former increases things like how much rage you start with, the frequency of rage gems and how much gold you earn in each battle. Improving the latter opens up additional attacks for your warbeast as well as the efficiency of attacks. In a nice twist, you have several tiers of warbeast powers to choose from ranging from powers linked to individual colors that do less damage but are available more quickly due to only needing to be filled by one color to massive, three color attacks that take longer to ready but do devastating amounts of damage. Along with improving statistics you can also take time to search for treasure, unlock dungeons for repeated beastie bashing and craft items. All of these are completed via minigames that serve as a variation of Tetris and while none of them are interesting enough to spend an entire gaming session on, they're in no way bad enough to make it so you don't want to spend time with them.