Puzzle Quest : Challenge of the Warlords

Reviewed by Chris Hori
April 22, 2007

Developer: 1st Playable Publisher: D3 Platform(s): PC (demo), DS, PSP Numbers of Players: 1 - 2 ESRB Rating: Everyone Website: Click Here

Puzzle quest is a nice blend of RPG and Puzzle game rolled into the tiny cartridge for the Nintendo DS.  The game play itself is simple enough for anyone to be able to quickly jump in, while the RPG elements will provide the needed depth that serious gamers will crave.

You start the game as one of 4 classes; Knight, Druid, Fighter, or Mage.  This choice will affect the RPG elements such as spells, abilities, and hit points.  The rest is as anyone would expect: a map to explore, quests to complete, money to earn, and levels with new abilities to be gained by earning XP.  In addition, you begin the game with an empty castle that can be built up.  Stables can be built for horses, schools can be built to learn new abilities, and dungeons can be built to hold captured monsters (so you can study their abilities and learn them for yourself).

Next is the actual puzzle element of the game.  Any form of combat or trial takes the form of a game of bejeweled.  For those unaware, in Bejeweled the goal is to line up 3 or more matching colored gems by swapping two of them at a time.  When 3 or more gems line up, they vanish and the gems above fall into the gaps and new gems appear at the top of the puzzle.

In Puzzle Quest, there are 7 main types of gems.  Coins provide the player with bonus money, purple stars provide extra health.  Then there are 4 other colored gems: red, blue, yellow, and green. When you destroy 3 or more of them by lining them up, you gain that color mana.  Spells require a set number of mana points in one or more colored pools to be cast.  Also, there are skull icons that do direct damage when destroyed to the player’s opponent.  In combat, players alternate turns, each trying to reduce the other’s health bar to 0.  Destroying 4 or more gems at a time allows a player to take an extra turn, as well as provide a bonus to the number of mana earned.  During training, you try to meet a preset requirement, such as ‘destroy 60 yellow gems’.

The best thing about this game is the free trial download!  If you are running windows XP, give it a shot.  The demo only allows you to go up to level 7, but besides that you are free to play the game to your heart’s content.  The actual DS game is much more polished and gets my vote for platform of choice.  The stylist makes it easy to swap gems, and the dual screen works well during battles, with player info on top and the puzzle board on the bottom.

At no point does this game innovate either the puzzle or RPG genre.  What it does do however, is combine the two in a very fun game that makes great use of the Nintendo DS.

Screenshots (click image to enlarge) :