Puzzle Kingdoms First Look

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords took everyone by surprise. An adventure world in which you upgraded wizards and warriors with experience points then fought enemies in games of Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest successfully merged two different genres. Fans were hooked, and they wanted more. More is finally here, and it's in the form of Puzzle Kingdoms, which looks every bit as fun as its predecessor.

Puzzle Kingdoms stands alone as its own role-playing adventure and is more of a spiritual successor to Puzzle Quest than a true sequel. The kingdom of Etheria is in trouble, and it's up to you to use your puzzling skills to defeat the enemy hordes. The game opens as you choose a male or female warlord. The warlord will recruit heroes to his or her banner, each with varying skills and abilities. Our first hero was a level-one old man, the equivalent of Glass Joe in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. You simply command your hero around an overworld map of Etheria, and often he'll be ransacked by bandits or enter an enemy township, triggering a, what else? Puzzle battle.

While the actual puzzle in Puzzle Quest was a re-skinned version of Bejeweled, Puzzle Kingdoms is a different sort of puzzle game and also from the mind of designer Steve Fawkner. Instead of flipping tiles, Fawkner wanted to slow things down a bit so overall strategy played a bigger part in the puzzle action, putting a larger emphasis on hero attacks. In Puzzle Kingdoms, you add a new tile from the border, pushing the entire row or column over one space, eliminating a series of three or more matching colored tiles that are touching--diagonal doesn't count, but L shapes work just fine. When you eliminate a group of blocks, your warrior that uses that respective color will receive one attack gem. For instance, a dragon may need four red gems before it can attack, so you simply blow up four sequences of red blocks to unleash the fiery breath of the dragon. Purchasing stronger warriors, such as dragons and minotaurs, is really what the role-playing aspect of Puzzle Quest is all about as you try to replace weak ranks of peasants and soldiers with mythological beasts. We saw gorgons, minions, trebuchets, and snake men each jump into the fray.

When you win a battle, you earn gold to be spent on new units. The game is really over when you no longer have gold to recruit units to go to battle for you. You can also equip special items that give your heroes persistent stat upgrades, such as boots, swords, and shields. Heroes can also wield magic spells (magic is filled by breaking colored blocks your warriors are not using for attack). Initially, Puzzle Kingdoms plays out with ease, but as you progress through the story and campaign, it will take great feats of role playing and puzzling to defeat an enemy army wielding dark magic.

Outside of the single-player game, there is also a multiplayer mode, although the development team is still solidifying exactly how the mode will work. In addition, there is a Quickplay mode in which you level up as high as you like to take on some high-level AI competition. There are also three minigames. In Dungeon, you have to finish the board within a specified time limit. In Tavern, you have a limited number of moves, and blocks will not drop with gravity, so you have to use a bit more strategy. Finally, in the Shrine mode, you try to eliminate each color from the board without the use of gravity--this mode also serves as the "boss battle" in the single-player mode. The DS, PC, and Wii versions will all play very similarly to each other, with the exception of their respective control interfaces.

We only had a few minutes with Puzzle Kingdoms, but it already appears to be a worthy follow-up to Puzzle Quest. The world of Etheria is huge; as you pan around the overworld map, you'll see islands, volcanic areas, ice areas, water areas, deserts, and forests--all waiting for you to explore and conquer. If you love the story and character upgrades of a role-playing game and the brain-busting action of a good puzzler, check out Puzzle Kingdoms when it is released later this year.