Smaller in scope, smaller in complexity, and greatly overshadowed by later works.
Note: This Review originally appeared on my blog at Countzeroor.com.
The original Puzzle Quest was an interesting title, which took the concept of the match-three puzzle game and translated it to something of a larger epic fantasy context – one which led to numerous clones in other genres, some of which I've previously done a rundown of on my blog. However, the original Puzzle Quest also had a more epic scope to it, with you having to fight an epic big-bad in order to save the world. The sequel, on the other hand, has a more grounded scope, feeling like it is taking the Puzzle Quest formula with Diablo.
Puzzle Quest 2 moves the setting of the story from the larger scale of a continent to the smaller scale of the archetypal town-on-the-Megadungeon. You end up going through a series of not very narratively deep, and mechanically basic quests ultimately building up to getting to the bottom of the mega-dungeon and killing the demonic monster that waits there. You do this by going through battles on a grid of multi-colored gems, and matching stones to power-up your abilities, as well as matching skulls for immediate attacks, and gloves to power up items for defensive abilities and more powerful attacks.
Where things change from the first title is the structure around the fight. In Puzzle Quest: Challenge of The Warlords – you picked up new abilities and upgraded your toolset through fortifying your castle and recruiting forces that way. Here, because the scope is smaller, the ways of improving your character are more personal – you find spells from teachers in the dungeon, you get weapons from chests with keyword-based abilities (like how weapons in Diablo have abilities based on the descriptive words in their name), and you get materials to upgrade your weapons at the blacksmith.
It’s ultimately a not very complicated game – there are a variety of different classes you can choose from at the beginning, and they have different abilities that you can pick up as you level up, and there are some gear limitations through the game based on your class. However, ultimately the game is very linear, and not very hard. The built I put together for my assassin early in the game ended up working for me for the rest of the game – the only changes I made to my character were to the weapons and armor I had equipped.
Puzzle Quest 2 is a game that’s worth picking up on sale, and it works for something to play with about half your attention while you watch something else on a different display, but it's nowhere near as revolutionary as the first game was. In a way, it fits with how basically the Puzzle Quest "Fighting With Bejeweled" kind of game has moved to so many other genres - it can't bring anything new to the table, because everybody else (including the developer, D3 Interactive) took the idea and ran with it on mobile platforms - compared to later Puzzle Quest games (and even knockoffs like WWE Champions), there isn't much that Puzzle Quest 2 can bring to the table that those games don't.
