![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Games I Have Played: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is a Bejeweled-style RPG, which is all you need to know to decide whether you'd like this game or not. In my case, I like fantasy RPGs and can quite happily play Bejeweled (or mahjong or Boxspin or Fishdom...) for hours, so Puzzle Quest was the perfect game for me!
I played as a fire wizard named Aria. (The game suggested Ulmina for a name, so I chose my own, better name.) It was a lot of fun! Wizard is probably the easiest class to beat the game with because they get lots of offensive spells. I'll probably replay the game at some point using another class, after I've had a chance to forget the story a bit more. Aria was kind of mouthy, and I wonder if that was a deliberate character decision or if the game only has one set of dialogue for the PC. To be determined when I play through again, I suppose.
Gameplay was super repetitive, so I don't recommend this game to anyone who doesn't love playing tile-matching games. One thing I appreciated was the lack of a time element for virtually all the battles. (I believe there's a timed option in the preferences, and training a mount requires playing a game with a time limit.) I...honestly don't know if grinding is a necessary element of the game or not. I know I only deliberately repeated a quest in order to gain experience at two points during the game, both early in the story. On the other hand, there are lots of encounters while traveling and I did repeat quests in order to capture creatures. It never felt like grinding to me, but that probably has more to do with me than with whether or not I was grinding.
The plot is nothing special, although I feel like there is a dark version of the plot floating in the background of the game that never gets acknowledged. (You siege cities all over the land in order to collect tithes from them! You capture creatures, keep them in your dungeon, and force them to teach you any spells they know! You steal runes from every outpost you come across in order to make better equipment for yourself! By the end of the game Aria could have easily become the next Dark Lord, and no one would have been able to stop her.)
The computer AI seems like it's a cheaty-face because the AI seems to get way more cascading matches than you the human player do. This might be true because the computer loads several rows of tiles above what you can see for smooth playing and the AI picks the best move. It should only pick the best move based on the tiles on the board, but it sure feels like it picks the best move based on all the tiles. The game is still not very difficult even with the AI being a possible cheaty-face, so I guess whether it is or not doesn't matter. I just spent a fair bit of time insulting the game because of its cheating ways.
I played as a fire wizard named Aria. (The game suggested Ulmina for a name, so I chose my own, better name.) It was a lot of fun! Wizard is probably the easiest class to beat the game with because they get lots of offensive spells. I'll probably replay the game at some point using another class, after I've had a chance to forget the story a bit more. Aria was kind of mouthy, and I wonder if that was a deliberate character decision or if the game only has one set of dialogue for the PC. To be determined when I play through again, I suppose.
Gameplay was super repetitive, so I don't recommend this game to anyone who doesn't love playing tile-matching games. One thing I appreciated was the lack of a time element for virtually all the battles. (I believe there's a timed option in the preferences, and training a mount requires playing a game with a time limit.) I...honestly don't know if grinding is a necessary element of the game or not. I know I only deliberately repeated a quest in order to gain experience at two points during the game, both early in the story. On the other hand, there are lots of encounters while traveling and I did repeat quests in order to capture creatures. It never felt like grinding to me, but that probably has more to do with me than with whether or not I was grinding.
The plot is nothing special, although I feel like there is a dark version of the plot floating in the background of the game that never gets acknowledged. (You siege cities all over the land in order to collect tithes from them! You capture creatures, keep them in your dungeon, and force them to teach you any spells they know! You steal runes from every outpost you come across in order to make better equipment for yourself! By the end of the game Aria could have easily become the next Dark Lord, and no one would have been able to stop her.)
The computer AI seems like it's a cheaty-face because the AI seems to get way more cascading matches than you the human player do. This might be true because the computer loads several rows of tiles above what you can see for smooth playing and the AI picks the best move. It should only pick the best move based on the tiles on the board, but it sure feels like it picks the best move based on all the tiles. The game is still not very difficult even with the AI being a possible cheaty-face, so I guess whether it is or not doesn't matter. I just spent a fair bit of time insulting the game because of its cheating ways.