I know, that title prolly doesn’t seem like something you can wrap your head around, but wait! don’t skim past this article!

I’m talking about a new game called Puzzle Quest. This game comes a referral by Beuks, so you know it’s gonna be classy. The basic premise of the game is a combination of the online fan favorite, Bejeweled. The difference is the rpg twist that it has incorporated. Now, this may seem a little absurd, but the game actually flows nicely. You start off by creating your “character”. The choices are pretty basic, warrior, knight, “magician”, and druid. You really only pick the sex and makeup, no additional features can be changed, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about gameplay!

So you start off in the center of the map with a standard rpg story line. Go see your father, go check out different towns, and so on. Once you begin, you can stop at the tavern and get some helpful clues. Then you start the training. It takes awhile to understand everything that’s going on, but once you do…..look out! The battle sequences look something like this….

If you notice the different colors, those are for your spells and weapons. Once you have collected the sufficient amount, you can cast damage or protection. Each character also has it’s own unique set of items that they can use. During this battle, you can also collect mana (money) and the purple bursts are used to boost your experience. The skulls are what inflicts damage onto your opponent.

That’s pretty much the jist of the battles. Once a battle is over, you can return to the castle where you can spend your money on various weapons and upgrading you castle. You can purchase things like a forge which gives you the ability to make “super weapons” and specialty items. Some buildings also let you capture creatures after beating them in battle 3 times. The way to capture a creature is buying completing a puzzle. Some of these are easy and some of these are hard. But they are pretty fun.

The only negative is that the game can get pretty overwhelming on some of the battles. Some of your enemies cast spells that gives them like 8 turns and the whole time you just sit there and watch your life drain. Other times, there will be only one move you can make, which then opens the board up for the enemy to make 4 in a row. I wish the AI would have been a little more forgiving with this. I can’t tell you how many times I had an enemy down to 6 or 7 hit points and mine was above 20 and I still lost the battle. But overall, a very fun little time waster, especially if your a fan of rpg’s.

So, all in all, I’ll rate this little guy a 4/5. I think it has a ton of replay value with each character and, of course, it is bejeweled!