Review by: Todd Brakke

As a sequel to an already popular game, Puzzle Quest 2 could have been reasonably successful as a complete re-hash of the original. Throw in some new creatures and characters, a new backstory, keep every bit of the existing gameplay intact, and slap it in a box. Instead Infinite Interactive played with the formula a bit. It’s still Puzzle Quest and all that entails, but the results of removing some existing puzzle variants, adding in some new ones, and completely replacing the larger, more epic game world of the first game with a much narrower dungeon-crawler are decidedly mixed.

For starters, the overall game, which can take a long time to finish, just isn’t particularly well balanced. Although the mechanics of this match-3 design are simple—line up a series of three to five colored “gems” to boost your character’s stats, allowing you to cast spells and do damage with weapons—the AI really struggles this time around to make effective use of its skills. It uses healing spells when it doesn’t need healing or is unable to maximize its benefits. It casts spells that require a plethora of red gems on the board to be effective when there are only a couple of them there. It, in general, fails to recognize its own dire need to inflict maximum damage as often as possible. The result is an AI that is incapable of beating even a novice player.

I lost a grand total of one encounter during my entire playthrough, and that was closer to the beginning than the end. Throughout the game, the AI taking my character to beneath half health was a monumental feat. At the same time, taking out an AI opponent, while assured, could take interminably long. Given the sheer number of encounters you must tackle, it’s critical that a puzzle encounter not last much longer than five to ten minutes. Owing to the limited amount of damage you can deal --usually around 10-30 points a shot, not counting the many times damage totals are halved due to defense ratings-- and the obscene number of hit points at play (250-450), encounters are far more likely to range into the 15-30 minute range. That’s just too long, and the result is that by mid-game any generic (non-quest) encounters in your way as you move from point A to point B become mind-numbingly monotonous.

It is still, by its nature, addicting. It is after all a match-3 game with RPG elements. These addictive elements are aided by some of the entirely new systems at work. Gone are experience and gold gems from battle encounters. Now it’s just the colored gems that represent different mana types, skull gems that inflict damage, and the new action gems that give your character action points that can be used to activate up to two handheld items your player character can now wield. These new items range from one and two-handed weapons that deal out varying amounts of damage, to shields that can improve your defense rating, to special mana potions that can aid in you ability to cast more spells. They’re a wonderful addition to the design, it’s just a shame that the AI cannot put up a real fight so that they become more pertinent.

Some of the new puzzle games: looting, room searches, trap disarmament, lock picking, etc.-- are extremely well done in that they maintain the core match-3 gameplay but tweak the strategy in a way that makes sense for that particular context. Searching a room requires you to match gems on as many different grid squares as possible. Lockpicking puts tumblers of a specific shape at the bottom of the screen, requiring you to match-3 over the top of them. Disarming a trap requires you to match a set number of various shapes without setting off the trap by accidentally matching too many sets of icons shaped like demon heads. The only real problem is that, like the combat encounters, it’s so startlingly easy to pass each of these challenges that there’s no sense of threat or tension whatsoever. Only the spell-learning puzzles that require solving specific problems to learn new spells remain a significant challenge.

If you were a big fan of the first game you should also be prepared for the huge change in scope. This game is focused on crawling through a single dungeon with a small town placed over the top of it, not unlike the original Diablo. There’s no sprawling overland map that you traverse and with that gone, so too are many of the encounter variants found in the first game. You can no longer craft your own weapons (you can pay for upgrades in town). There are no more sieges of towns that, when complete, add gold to your coffers. There are no mounts or learning spells from captured beasties.

The new mini-games help offset many of these losses, but ultimately these changes end up leaving Puzzle Quest 2 feel like its vision and scope have been radically scaled back. The story is so inconsequential to the experience that even having finished it, I couldn’t begin to tell you what it was about. A town is attacked. You kill some monsters and follow them into a hole where you keep killing more and more monsters until you finally kill the super mega monster and everyone’s really happy about it. The end. Story is never intended to be a huge part of the experience in this kind of game, but in this case it’s thin even by the standards of the genre.

Ultimately Puzzle Quest 2 isn’t a bad game, it’s just a disappointing one. There are other games in this genre that should get your greenbacks before you invest in this one, including the stellar Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes and the original Puzzle Quest. Measure your expectations accordingly.