spooon's Full Review: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for DS
Puzzle Quest – Challenge of the Warlords
(40+ hours played in solo mode, 50+ multiplayer matches, and one level 47 warrior)
With versions on the DS, PSP, and coming for platforms for xbox live marketplace and PC, why is this game worth your time?
Puzzle Quest is your basic run of the mill role playing game that requires a sole character to move from area to area attacking stuff and leveling up. At the core, it’s just item collecting and leveling up. Basically, this formula is very familiar to any rpg player and you will either love it or think it’s boring. Repetitive button presses of attack, use item, use spell, yadda yadda. Good thing is you don’t have any random encounters as you don’t have to worry about walking then get sucked into a battle screen. All enemies will be at set points or between them blocking your both to get there. The battle mechanics is where puzzle quest breaks from that mold.
Basics
4 professions are available at the start of the game with multiple character designs from hot chicks to feminine looking guys. Druid, Wizard, Warrior, Knight. Each of them have different spell moves and have a different growth path. I have some experience with all of them except the druid. The growth paths differ between classes in that when you level up you will get a set number of points to allocate to boost you base stats like Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Morale etc. The warrior only cost 1 pt to upgrade 1 level for Fire and Battle and other categories like cunning might be more.
The 4 basic mana categories is Fire (Red), Water (Blue), Air (Yellow), and Earth (Green). The other categories are Cunning (who starts first and money bonuses), Battle (basic attacks), and Morale (hit points). In any category you upgrade you will get higher percentages to get bonuses like extra turns or even being able to get more kick backs. If you have a high fire number, you will get more red mana for basic 3 red match then someone with a lower one. My character was getting over 8+ red for a basic match and higher chances to get an extra turn.
Combat
Bejeweled is the battlefield. You get this grid that is the main playing ground and you get one move to match the mana balls, or purple stars (experience), Gold coins (money), or skulls (straight damage). If you match 3 mana balls you get +3/4/5.. depending on your character build and bonuses to your mana reserve. The reason you want to have mana is each character has spells/moves they can perform if they get enough mana. Like the warrior has a Throw Ax move that does damage equal to the amount of skulls on the board. To be able to perform this move you need enough mana to pull it off. You will see the requirement on under your character when you’re battling.
3 match – basic collection
4 match – get extra turn
5 match – drops a wild card multiplier (3x, 4x…)
You use the stylus a lot and instead of click and dragging a cell, you just tap the initial box you want to move then you just tap the adjacent box you want it to move to.
So you say you don’t know what your spell does, or what the enemy spells does? No problem. So you forgot what bonuses your weapon or your enemy weapon has? No problem. This game as by far the BEST help system I’ve seen to date. During battle if you need to check on an item or just see what the enemy has as his gear, just hold the L trigger and the top screen will now go to the bottom and you can click anything. You can click the character and weapons and it will tell you exactly what you want t know. No more guessing to what the enemy has or what they can do to you. Since only the bottom window is touch sensitive, it was so smart of the developers to swap screens just for a moment so you can do some investigation into your character or your enemy. This isn’t as useful in multiplayer with time limits as you won’t have enough time in 8 seconds but by default time is zero and there are many increments you can use for time.
Chain couple matches in a row and get Heroic Effort and get some extra experience points from getting it.
Eventually you will learn more spells and you have to decide on a certain number to take into battle. A lot of the spells are junk like turn all yellow balls into purple experience.
So the goal is to take your opponent’s hit points (HP) to zero. This can be done with doing direct damage matching skulls or pulling off damage spells. Each profession has a different strategy to win games. If you build the character correctly, you will see knights with huge amounts of hit points or warriors with an insanely high fire stat. After you win/lose the battle ends and you get experience and gold. So pretty much fight, level up, and beat the game but there is so much more! If you lose a battle you don’t die, you just have to fight it again. You will go to every battle maxed out HP so you don’t have to worry about going to hospitals or carry healing potions. All mana reserves will reset to your character’s base starting point. Everyone initially starts at zero but when you start getting different gear you might actually start with like 40 Fire mana right off the bat. If there are no more moves on the board, the board will clear and reset itself but will also clear both challenger’s mana reserve. This sucks big time if you were building up for a large spell cast. This doesn’t happen that much but when it does, it could be the end of you if your low on hit points.
The other main stat that is vitally important is resistance. You start at 0% for all 4 mana but as you start go get new gear they will allow you to get small increases like 5% resistance to earth. If an enemy wants to cast a spell that uses green mana (earth) you have a 5% chance to resist it. If you resist the spell a giant circle and resist will appear in the middle of the screen and then it’s your turn. This also works for enemies too as some will have very high resists. Cities don’t but their huge amounts of hit points allows them to take a beating.
Gameplay
Mounts – Yes, you get to ride animals! These are helpful to get you to move from town to town faster/slower. The mounts will also give you bonuses to your base stats like increase your cunning and all of them have 1 spell that they will let you use in battle. There is a slot for a spell just for you mount so you get an extra spell you get to use in battle without having to sacrifice one of your own. You can’t buy mounts, but rather you need to capture them. This option comes up when you have beaten that animal a couple times. When you train to high level mounts, you will be giving the option to cancel a fight and the enemy will disappear so you can basically skip a lot of weaker enemies you don’t want to hassle with. As mount levels go up, the bonuses to you also go up.
Base - Your base is where you will pay to upgrade to do different things like learn spells, train mounts, forge weapons, improve skills…. If you play the game correctly, you should be able to buy all of it very quickly.
Money can be received by quests you get at towns, winning/losing battles, or capturing cities by siege. You can attack a friendly/enemy town and own it for yourself (for the horde!). So when you visit that town again they will pay you some gold and you will then have access to your base to be able to train and make weapons from any captured town so you don’t have to do it at your main starting city. Money can buy you only gear like armor, weapons, and accessories and will NOT buy you spells or mounts. Money’s greatest help is allowing you to BUY your stat growths. You can buy morale points instead of using 2-3 points to get up one level.
Companions – You get little buddies that add different types of stats like 10 points of damage at the beginning of battle vs the undead. Most of these are not powerful enough to really help you that much, and these are useless in head to head multiplayer but nice to know there are a total of 8.
Capturing enemies and using runes. When you fight an enemy a couple times it will give you the option to “Capture”. This feature allows you the ability to learn the enemy’s special ability. Each enemy will have cool stuff like healing and weird direct attacks not available for the player. You capture enemies not buy battling them but instead you get a set puzzle and you have to clear the entire board. If you leave any items on the board because you have no more moves you lose. You can do this forever until you get it. Some are very easy and some are so hard you need to hit the FAQs. Once you capture them it will either give you their spells or turn into a useable mount. Even after capturing, you don’t automatically learn the spell. It’s just now available. To learn it you need to build up your base to allow for “Learn spell” which I believe is the mage tower. You learn spells buy then doing a bejeweled board but this time you need to match a certain amount of red/yellow/blue/green/scrolls. You don’t have the use of your special skills and if you don’t have anymore more moves you lose and have to try again.
Capturing Cities – This is where the money is made. You will get the opportunity to attack friendly/foe cities to add to your own and they will pay you ever time you visit after a small amount of time. The siege of a city is a basic battle but cities have a huge amount of hit points. Even early on, the cities migh have like 200 hit points when my character had only like 80 hit points. If you have upgraded your home base there should be an option to prevent revolts. I only had 1 revolt and that was at the beginning.
Difficulty – Easy/Normal/Hard and with timers. The default setting is to Normal with no time limit. This makes it a great game to play when you’re watching some tv so you can just let it sit without pausing without fearing of missing anything. Easy difficulty is really just to get your feet wet. You shouldn’t lose to an easy opponent more then a couple times the entire game. There are some bosses that are pretty hard even on easy but still manageable.
Multiplayer – You can fight one other person over wireless LAN. The options are timer and handicap. I suggest 8 sec handicap in that if they take longer you lose a turn and lose 5 hit points. This helps keep the game moving. Handicap is a great feature the will try and even out the level differences between 2 people. It won’t make it so they are even or even make it so it’s that much easier for the lower level player to win, but will give the lower level player a chance. I’ve beaten a level 20 knight with my level 10 wizard. As you go up in rank, you will need to stay closer in level to have a fighting chance or if you have geared your character well. My level 40 warrior can take down a level 50 knight easily if the knight didn’t gear up his character correctly.
Story
Story is so basic and bland it is best to just skip it. YES!!! You get to actually skip the story if you want to and just blow through the quests unlike other games which force you to mash the skip button over and over because the developer want so spoon feed you the generic story. Great feature! The quests will spring up and you will be able to take the main story ones, take side quests, or even repeat some other quests. There is some variety as you will have choices to do what the quests ask (keep weapons that were supposed to be returned to an owner) which gives it some freedom to how you want to play it. There is no karma system so you pretty much could keep a lot of the gear and never finish the quest if you wanted.
Graphics and Sound
Graphics on the world map level is kind of blocky and not to crisp. The character design looks pretty cool and has a very dungeon and dragons feel to it. When you fight an enemy it will show you a decent picture of it and some of the highlights to what it can do in terms of spells. The sound is pretty basic like coins knocking into each other when you get gold match. When you guy is about to die a lady says “your hero is close to death” or something like that. Never cool to hear that when you’re in a close fight over multiplayer. The best sound effect is when you get a heroic effect because you hear all this crashing and explosions from the combo chains. It needed like a killer instinct type sound effect like “TEN HIT COMBO, EXCELLENT” and that would have been awesome.
All in all this game is great solo and multiplayer. The multiplayer starts to get stale once you get certain spells as even handicapping the matches won’t help much. Too bad you can have your opponent see when you do a heroic effort as that is only displayed on the screen of the user. That is a nice way to rub it into your opponents face.
Cons
-No WFC (it’s only over local wireless play. This really needs to be online even with friend codes)
-At higher levels the combo spells and super spells makes the game unplayable since some spells can loop and others can do like 200+ points of damage.
-Can’t trade items
-Handicap doesn’t work all that great
-Needs more sound effects (please use the ones in mortal kombat or killer instinct)
-There is no win/lose record for multiplayer
-Sometimes hard to tell difference from yellow mana ball to green mana ball.
-Learning some spells or forging some items can’t be learned. You would do one move and the game ends. So you might get stuck with a board that doesn’t have a lot of options and trying to get like 200 blue mana only to find out you were 3 short will really drive you up the wall.
Spoiler alert to how to play
So you want to know how to make a god quick? Build a Warrior and spec him to be all FIRE. I’m talking every level use up your 2 level points only on fire. If you want you can use a little for battle but by level 40 I was pushing over 100 fire. Initially, you won’t see that much benefit as it will only give you more fire points when you match red gems but you will see it’s effect when you get 2 things firewalker staff and level 40 spell beathbringer. The firewalker staff I bought and the beathbringer spell is a warrior specific spell. The firewalker staff will deal damage depending on the amount of red mana you have in reserve. So when enemies are doing like 4-8 damage when matching 3 skulls, you should be doing close to 14+ when you max out red. You don’t even have to max it out to get it’s benefit. The deathbringer spell takes 8 of each and 16 of fire but when you get it and if your red mana is high, game over! The spell will create half of all your red mana. So if you got like 100 red mana, it will create 50 random generated skulls. What this means is, TOTAL DISTRUCTION OF THE BOARD. It will match so many skulls and create so many wild card drops you can rinse and repeat. The key is to have a lot of red mana stored up before doing it. Since you are also using the firewalker staff, you will be doing so much damage it will usually only take one spell cast to end the fight. I’ve done over 200 hit points of damage on a knight when I was level 40. Cities will fall to their knees with this spell. Before you can get deathbringer, you will get BURN and that turn all red gems into skulls and you won’t end your turn if you have 15+ red. This will be your major damage spell as you can setup 4-5 of a kinds easily if you watch for it and it’s a low mana requirement.
-All other stat growths, just buy them with the money you have at your main camp.
–Use a slow mount like the rat so you can pretty much just walk back and forth to get money.
-Only put in your level stat bonuses in categories that take 1 point to level up. The ones that take 2-3 just buy those.
-High cunning is good so you can start off first and the rat’s specialty is cunning bonuses.
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