No post last week and now this one's late? I could give an excuse. The last couple of weeks have been hectic; we've gotten a new cat, I've been participating in extracirriculars, and some odd events have come up. Nothing too major, though. Really, I'm just lazy.
That said, better late than never. Even my own lassitude can't stop me from writing occasionally, only delay it.
I've mentioned this game a few times on the show, and I think it needs a small boost in its player base. Still. The game is Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, an insidiously addictive mix of what Alex would call housewife games and a generic fantasy RPG.
In a world where monstrous creatures and fey wildlings near some conveniently placed, and rather expansive, mountains, a young knight in training, but somehow not a squire, is about to embark upon an epic journey. And by epic, we mean pretty generic, but cool, we guess.
The premise is that you fill the role of a character whose class you get to choose. You're called a knight most of the time, which is a bit confusing given that knight is actually one of the classes, which you may or may not actually be. Each class has its strengths and weaknesses, but they're not how you traditionally associate them.
That's because this is a game of resource acquisition. Kinda. You see, you spend most of this game in combat. Thankfully, it's not random, so you know when a fight's coming. However, you enter every fight with full health, so that's not really a concern. Depending on your skills and equipment, you may also start with some mana.
Your four battle resources, mana, are all flavors of the classic elements. In order to garner yourself some more mana points, you must match three or more gems of the appropriate color on the board. You get however many you matched, in addition to some bonuses based on your skills or equipment. If you get four in a row, you nab an extra turn, and if you get five, you get the extra turn and a wildcard for any color and a bonus number of points. You can deal damage to your opponent (I'll get to that) by matching skulls. You can also pick up bonus experience and gold, but that matters less for winning a combat.
So far, it sounds pretty bland. You've seen it before. Where this game really shines is that each class learns different abilities to affect the board. My personal favorite turns a large number of gems into red gems and skulls, making certain you can dish out some damage that round. Red generally powers damaging/combat abilities, green and yellow play intermediate roles, and blue usually helps with healing. While this role for the elements isn't particularly new, it does lend a bit of strategy to what is otherwise a mind numbing diversion.
You and your opponent take turns matching gems and making use of your abilities to put an end to each other. You can learn new abilities by capturing enemies, done by solving a puzzle, forge weapons, done by collecting runes and getting really lucky, pay money to train skills, buy new equipment, and generally minmax your way to victory. It's a lot of fun, even if every combat is essentially the same.
This game has two main failings. If you've been following some of the links, you may have gotten my impression of the story.
Spoiler: it's super generic.
Great spoilers, I know.
Basically, some undead guy is threatening your kingdom, but you're constantly getting sidetracked, usually by orcs or something. Eventually, you'll have a showdown with him, and... you win or something? It's actually a pretty clean cut ending, and some of the characters are amusing, but the story itself is nothing to write home about. I don't know how many of you are abroad while reading this, but save yourself the postage. We have the Internet.
My second complaint about this game is that the combat is essentially random. On occasion you're given a wonderful setup to exploit with one of your ability combos, but it's pretty much up to luck to guide you to victory. This makes it mildly frustrating when you keep losing combats because you only get to make two moves while your opponent gets to make ten moves in a row. Thankfully, the penalty for a loss is pretty light; you just have to try again.
Though it's definitely flawed, the idea is genius. It's a ton of fun, and disturbingly good at picking at your neuroses. Humans have this tendency to notice patterns, and this game exploits and abuses the fact that we enjoy doing so. It's definitely worth a look, especially if you own a 3DS since it's on the VC there. However, this game came out on damn near everything.
From what I've heard, the sequel is superior in just about every way, but I haven't yet gotten around to letting that game consume my life for a while. It's pretty well suited to "pick up and set down" styles of play, but you'll have a hard time actually setting it down because you were so close to beating that damn centaur and if you could just get that one combo off maybe you could win and...
You might see where that's going. Give it a try if you feel like wondering where you lost a few hours.
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