Review by: Brandon "Leapgate" Cackowski-Schnell

Here at GameShark, our editor is a reasonably affable person, unless you miss a deadline. (I am a nice fellow, it’s true. –ed ) Understandable in a business where timeliness is next to Godliness. I've never missed a deadline; however I came pretty damn close with this review. I almost missed my deadline because I can't stop playing the game I was supposed to write the review for, which is a great thing for the game, but a bad thing for the writer. a cost, but that cost is a pittance compared to the sheer puzzle awesomeness that lies within.

So, let me get right to it so that I can go back to matching gems and dropping mines on fools like atom bombs: Puzzle Quest: Galactrix takes everything that was great about the original Puzzle Quest and kicks it up a notch. The puzzles are more complex, the world is bigger, and there are more ways to turn your enemies into flaming balls of wreckage. Unfortunately all of this comes at

In the future, mankind is represented by several large mega-corporations and it is these corporations that have spread out across the galaxy, bending it to their will. Someone came up with the bright idea to get their clone on, and the experiment escapes, heading off to parts unknown and breaking all of the leapgates, the main method of galaxy hopping, in the process. You play a young pilot tasked with figuring out what escaped, and what they're up to. If you decide to make some food runs, or punish some pirates, or act as a spy for warring alien races while you're at it, well, that's up to you. Everybody has to make a living. The story isn't exactly epic, but it certainly does its part well, namely giving you a reason to travel to the dozens upon dozens of systems that make up the game's world. Yes, it's that big, with each section having something to do in it, whether it's mining asteroids, or crafting items, or fighting enemies. Heck, if none of those options exist, yet you still want to get your fight on, you can always pick a fight with the random ship flying around each section. Sure, your faction rating may go down, but no one said that leveling up would be easy, or pretty.

All of the activities, from the combat to the mining and the crafting are done via the same addictive gem matching that has made Bejeweled Lord and Master of all puzzle games. Galactrix puts its own twist on the genre with two notable additions. First, the pieces are hexagonal, rather than square, meaning that there are six possible ways to make a match, or six possible ways for you to miss a match leading to your opponent matching those mines and blowing a hole in your hull. Second, as you're playing in gravity-less space, as gems are matched, new gems slide to the board in the same direction as the match was made. This adds an extra layer to combat as if multiple opportunities for the same match exist you have to consider not only the surrounding gems, but the angle of attack to make the most subsequent matches possible or impossible depending on the situation.

What changes about the minigames is the object of the game as well as the constraints placed upon it. In combat, you match mines to do damage to your opponent, as well as use whatever weapons you've equipped your ship with. Each ship has both shields and hull strength to deal with, meaning that when choosing your germ match, you have to weigh whether you're going for the jugular, or sitting back and licking your wounds, hoping for a massive blue gem match to replenish your lost shields. When mining, you match gems that represent the various elements you can mine from an asteroid. The goal is to match as much as you can before no more matches can be made. When crafting, the goal is to match gems of a color, which then spawns another gem which must be matched with the same "made" gems (albeit with no similar color restrictions), before there are no more matches. Match enough gems and you make a perfect part, match under the requirements and your part is sub-optimal.

Finally, remember those pesky, broken down leapgates? Well, hacking them requires fevered gem matching as well. You have to make color matches in a particular order, all while the clock burns down. Make all of the matches in time and the gate opens, and stays open for a pretty good length of time as you flit around the galaxy. As in the original Puzzle Quest, even when failing you still succeed. If you fall in battle, you keep all of the experience and can simply retry. If you don't mine everything from the asteroid, you get to still keep what you did mine. Only hacking the leapgates give you nothing for failure, but hey, sometimes all you get for failing is a big old goose egg. This ain't AIG.

Combat is the same mix of give and take as in the original game. As you move around the galaxy, you can have up to three ships at your disposal at a time, all with different stats in the game's three major areas: gunnery, computers and engines. The higher the stats in each area, the more pieces of equipment you can assign to your ship that use those particular areas. Ships differ not only in those stats but also in their hull and shield strength, but their cargo capacity as well. If you know that you're doing nothing but mining runs, take the huge cargo freighter and just hope that you don't get attacked by pirates. If you're doing attack runs, take the ship with the huge guns and shields but doesn't have enough room to pack a lunch. As every galaxy has planets that you can visit to manage your inventory to switch up what ship and what equipment you're using, experimentation is very quick and easy. And you'll need to experiment too, as no one combination will work for all encounters. Some encounters will let you go in hot, weapons blazing as your opponent has few offensive capabilities, but plenty of ways to reinforce their ships. Others will have you playing more of a defensive game as you make matches to keep your enemy from powering up their weapons, waiting for the right time to unleash a strike of your own.

I have heard many the grumblings about the "randomness" of the battles in this game, and how that randomness wasn't in the original game and I'd like to take the time to address those folks right now. Yeah, you're wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.