I’m sure you’ve already heard the Puzzle Quest games described as “Bejewelled with hit points”. It is a pretty base statement, but not entirely untrue. Puzzle Quest 2 continues the tradition of adding role playing elements to a match-3 puzzle game, but this newest version does a few things that make it more enjoyable than its predecessors.

At the start of the game, you once again pick a character class from a stable of role playing standards. As you would expect, the class determines your character’s strengths and weaknesses, and which equipment they can use. While I found the original game to be overbalanced in favor of the warrior classes, Puzzle Quest 2 seems to have improved its balance throughout the experience.

Your weapons and armor do more than give passive stats in this iteration. They are now usable in battles by collecting action points in the form of gauntlets on the battle field. You still match skulls to do basic damage, but I found myself relying much more on my weapons and spells this time around. It adds an extra layer of strategy to the battle system and makes it a heck of a lot less frustrating.

The battles themselves also seemed to have been greatly balanced over the first. I found the original to be incredibly frustrating after getting a few hours in. The AI opponents seemed to always know what blocks were about to fall from off screen, and would often magically set up completely unpredictable (to a human player) combos that were impossible to defend against. But the sequel fixes this.

The drops in Puzzle Quest 2 also feel a lot better. I found it much less frequent to see a single move produce a dozen or more combos from off-screen drops. That was a huge annoyance in the first game, and it seems to have been corrected for the sequel.

I also prefer this game’s more intimate take on the overworld. Instead of a map with tiny icons representing your character, various kingdoms, and monsters, you are actually at the human level via an isometric view of the surrounding area. Sure, it’s a cosmetic touch, but it has a much better feel than before. You actually get the sense that these characters exist in some sort of world, rather than as dots on a map.

As you would expect in an RPG, you will buy, sell, and find new gear. My main gripe with Puzzle Quest 2 is that when you are given a choice between gear from defeating a monster, you can’t compare the stats to what you already have equipped. Unless you have kept a detailed log of your equipment, you’ll find yourself guessing at what you should take.

There is also a built in hint system. In theory, it will suggest a move if you are taking to long to make a match. What I found would often happen is that it would immediately start pointing to a potential move, like an excited younger sibling pointing at the screen and going “Oooh, oooh!”. It’s not a major issue, though, as you can turn the arrow off if you want.

That’s another area where PQ2 feels a lot better than the original. In the first game, nearly every time you would use the AI’s suggestion, it would end in disaster. The aforementioned cascade of combos from off-screen in the opponents favor would have been laughable had it not been so maddeningly frustrating. They seemed to have fixed that, much to the joy of my sanity meter.

Puzzle Quest 2 also offers a variety of multiplayer modes. You can use the hero you have been building up in the single player campaign or even set up matches between the game’s various monsters. This gives it a lot of replayability since you can sit on the couch and battle with your friends, or play them over Xbox Live.

It may sounds like I am down on the original game, but I actually did enjoy it quite a bit. Puzzle Quest 2, while the same in its core mechanic, feels like an improvement in all the ways I could have asked for. It’s a great game for relaxing with on the couch. The additional mechanics added via the RPG elements help keep things feeling fresh for a lot longer than your standard match-3 game. All in all, it’s a fun package worth checking out.

This review is based on code of the final build of the Xbox Live Arcade version of Puzzle Quest 2 provided to us by D3Publisher.

Tags: Casual Games, D3Publisher, DS, Infinite Interactive, match-3, puzzle games, Puzzle Quest 2, xbla, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.