In space, no one can hear you scream in frustration...
Luck and Patience - those two words symbolized the original. When Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Overlords was released everyone knew the game was essentially a Bejeweled clone wrapped in a RPG style adventure. What they didn't know was an incredibly in depth puzzler that demanded patience, concentration and more then just a little luck. Fast forward a few years later and we have Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. Still using the same match 3 or more colours in a row concept but now with even more patience and concentration required, but also maybe more luck we can muster.
The game take place in a Sci-Fi theme where you take control of a young hero out to save the world - now for the purposes of this I am actually not going to comment on the story aspect at all. In fact, from what I've seen so far it seems pretty decent. You take control of this hero who can gain ships and allies - allies to my understanding as I have all but one just add required minigames to the puzzle game interface and not actual stat bonuses to the game, which is a shame. These mini games could range from interesting and fun like hacking or haggling, or the annoying such as hacking. All of them all essentially required at one if not more point in the game and all of them will be repeated Ad infinitum within the puzzle surface of the game with various rule changes.
Unlike Overlords which relied on essentially a 2D playing field, matching icons at the bottom and new gems dropping from the topic - Galactric changes this by adding a hexagonally playing field essentially making it much harder to predict where gems will be dropping. There are six (6) quadrants that gems can be shifting from and not only that but the board shifts horizontally or vertically depending if you move the pieces in different directions. So if you swap a yellow which is lower with a blue which is higher then the board will shift up, and vise versa if you go the other way. The game does a good job explaining the ropes but after the initial tutorial of how to move around and exit the system it pulls an Oblivion on you and you're literally on your own. This causes not a huge amount of confusion but also a lot of frustration because you are literally learning the game as you play - which is I guess my fault since I have yet to break out the in game manual to learn about this stuff but a lot of the stuff is by design. I know it makes sense after you find this out but this game changing stuff should be told to you when you play the game by the game itself automatically.
By design once you open your first warp gate by hacking, which I'll get to in a moment - you are literally given the entire universe to explore. Unlike the original Puzzle Quest there are no boundaries at all, if you want to go all the way to the other edge of the universe you can - and the unfortunate thing is that you have to for some missions that require you to deliver useless random goods like food. Along the way you are attacked by random pirates and the like that are not able to be escaped because if you do that leads you to the previous star system, you must fight and win to continue or hope and pray they go away which I did not test long enough to see if it actually happens. This is the beginning of the frustration in the game. You will be hacking into many, many systems in the game - I have read other reviews that state that they actually may or can close at times but I cant confirm this. Hacking is just a mini game of clearing a series of specific colour gems in a certain times. I have only done easy but there are a few where I struggled for a good 3 or 4 times in a row to do, and to put into perspective those usually give you 90 seconds to clear. The incessant repetition of these tasks and the inability to skip this really grates on my nerves at times. Other mini games are not as annoying which is a major blessing.
What is also frustrating is the lack of natural progression in the game, and the constant scaling of the game. There will be no time, or at least extremely rarely will you ever face an inferior opponent. I was following natural main quest story progression, I did one or two extra side missions and I was at level 11. I was then tasked on my next main quest mission to defeat a ship at level 19. To put that into perspective, imagine doing a siege back in Overlords on one of the city's and castles without appropriate skills or hit-points. It's quite possibly impossible. Its really depressing and frustrating to play matches that last for close to 10 minutes, especially broken one sided ones, and find that you have to grind out loss experience to get levels. Levels are only meaningful for your maximum hull HP which goes up so much on level ups, leveling your stats doesn't show immediate dividends except for the Pilot category which gives you a bonus to shields. I think this is one factor that will force a lot of people, including me to replay their game after they click in on how the game play mechanics work truly as, again, you don't gain actual skills or tangible benefits from leveling your stats other then your shields. Shields are a boon and bust in the game - they add a lot of strategy on the game but I have been in a lot of impossible-win fights where a enemy clearly has much better skills than I do and incredible amount of shields, even shield regenerating skills, and it became just a debuff fight of him debuffing everything I tried to do and my armour as well which forced me to lose the fight. Needless to say the learning curve for this game is downright ridiculous and that's sad because most people will be turned off once the going gets rough - if there was better progression or tutoring, or even scaling of enemies most people wouldn't get frustrated as much. You're thrown into the fire in this game.
Instead of skills in the previous game you now outfit your ship with weapons or abilities. You use said weapons or ability from the built up gem balance during battle. These weapons are really awesome but more stuff, at least to me, at the beginning of the game are extremely under powered and not worth the price. I think the most worth while weapon I found in the first few sectors was a laser that did 5 damage which was strangely not as good as my default laser which did 5 damage +1 for every red I had saved. Meanwhile, you are fighting computer AI which MUCH better skills and there are many times you could have these skills instead such as Bola Mines which creates random mines on the screen which the computer does always at the best time when there's a lot of mines already on the screen which pretty much nukes my character. Yes, mines have replaced skulls in the game and they still do the same thing and yes - they seem to drop more for the computer then you. The skill and strength difference between you and a normal computer opponent is so large not because of their level but because of their ship and weapons/abilities.
I really hoped I did not scare everyone away. Throughout this review I have touched on a lot of the games negatives which I feel are important to mention. By no means is this a bad game, the game is designed to be like this - hard. The game is a good game I would recommend it whole heartily to everyone who enjoyed and essentially put up with Overlords frustrations, limitations and randomness. I just want to stress that unlike the first game, you have a lot less control on all these three things and that's what puts this as a love it or hate it kind of game. There are a lot of things I enjoyed; the total immersiveness of the game, the grandeur of the universe and potentially the story, the customizability of your ships which you can have three of. I think the disappointment is coming from the majority of people thinking this is just Puzzle Quest 2, or a natural extension of the first game. This game is so totally different from the original game that if you are expecting it to be a natural extension or something you can learn after the first fight you will be absolutely disappointed. It's like going from D&D 2 rules to D&D 3. The changes are so black and white it's not even funny.
Finally as a minor gripe I have, there is a major technical issue I have with my version: I have the Xbox 360 Arcade version as you can tell, I don't know if this is just me which I doubt but the game saves an incredible amount of time - exiting out of menus, pauses, anything you can think of - almost freezing the game for a good 5 to 10 seconds sometimes. I hope this gets solved or limited or disabled or something - I understand the need to save but not every 5 minutes it seems and that locks my game, if it was background saving I wouldn't mind but this takes control of the game entirely.
This game is flawed yes, but those flaws are unfortunately by design; its designed too difficult for it to be a casual game. This is now treading waters of being a hardcore even a niche puzzler title which is understandable. I applaud the developers for taking the game to the next level but what we have is something so very different that we played and loved and its a totally different beast all together. Personally, it's an acquired taste - I urge everyone to try the demo if you're thinking about picking this up first. At 1600 points of essentially 20 dollars American it is a lot of cheddar but if you can handle the first few hours of shock therapy you'll find dozens and dozens of hours story, outfitting and puzzling to fit your fancy - just dont mind that major kick in the ass with your first few hours with the learning curve..