Puzzle Quest Galactrix
Puzzle Quest Galactrix has been out for NDS and XBLA for a short while. I had captured this footage about a week about before it had been released for PS3, but I’ve played both and it seems pretty identical for each system. So while the video below shows gameplay from the 360 demo. This review is written based on the PS3 full version.
For those who missed out on it, the original Puzzle Quest (Challenge of the Warlords) was a wickedly fun, addictive, and difficult game release for pretty much every console.
The game played sort of like an RPG where a typical battle was instead replaced by a puzzle game similar to Bejeweled. You make combinations of puzzle pieces to get magic points, money, experience, or damage your enemy, while he does the same trying to attack you.
An expansion followed which makes me wonder if we’ll get some DLC for this version.
Galactrix really mixes things up. Aside from taking the fantasy theme and changing it to Sci-Fi, the square bejeweled like battle field was replaced with a hex grid. (Which has me constantly penalized for trying to make flowers like in Hexic). The game is still played by combining 3 or more of the same pieces together, only now you have to move thing differently. Also depending on the direction you move, the board refills from that direction. This adds a lot more strategy (and confusion) to the battles.
To move a piece you must choose a piece and then the piece you want to swap with nearby. The old Puzzle Quest had you choose a piece and drag it to a new position which made for faster gameplay. The hex grid slows things down a bit and can cause a lot of mistakes when you try to rush you moves, which you will be doing on certain mini games that timed.
That brings us to the mission types themselves. There are more than just battles now. Some are simply to move around the galaxy and explore planets. Others involve mining asteroids for minerals, or hacking leap gates to open new systems.
The battles play out much like the original game.
The mining ones are by far my favorite. Minerals only fill up a certain percentage of the grid and the goal is to make as many mineral combinations as you can until there are no more moves available to me made. You can sell those minerals are different spaceports to buy new weapons or even new ships.
The gate hacking games are timed and the idea is that you have to make a certain number of matches. The concept is a bit difficult to explain, but basically you have a chain of matches you have to make. It could be yellow, red, blue…. So you have to first match some yellow pieces, than you can match blue, and so on. It doesn’t matter if you match a piece that’s not in sequence, in fact you’ll most likely have to in order to move other piece into position.
The galaxy map looks quite big and there seems to be a lot to do in this game.
If you haven’t played a puzzle quest game before try this demo or the original. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, and if you want to take it online multiplayer matches are available in both games!
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