A solid and entertaining puzzle game, but you'll be pulling your hair out on some levels.
Jewel Quest plays out very much like Bejeweled, in which by swapping two gems, or "relics," as they're called in this game, you make a line of three or more relics, thus removing them from the board. In Jewel Quest, when you make a match of relics, the squares they occupy turn into gold. When all the squares of the level are turned into gold, you win and move on to the next level.
While this game can be very entertaining, it can also make you want to smash your monitor sometimes. Many of the puzzles have very unusual shapes, several of which require some very intense acrobatics to get the correct relics in position to win. However, when relics are removed from the grid, new ones cascade into place And if these relics formed more matches, these would be removed as well. The problem with this is that sometimes falling relics would remove the relics that I had spent so much time getting into the correct position to match with a relic in a difficult place.
Although it is very had to have no more moves ever in a level, each level has a time limit. If you do not turn all the squares into gold in that time interval, you lose a life and have to start over from the VERY beginning. It was VERY annoying to have to restart a whole level after all that hard work just because I couldn't turn one tiny little square into gold in time.
The final problem is that this game seemed too generic. There are no special powerups or anything to make the game more interesting. It is just straight matching relics again and again and again. While there are things like buried relics, which you needed to match multiple times for it to disappear, there was nothing else to add a little strategy or pizazz to the game. Although I have only finished the game up to the second rank, so there might be things that I haven't gotten to yet.
Jewel Quest is a great game for casual games or fans of other puzzle games such as Bejeweled, but hardcore gamers and gamers who don't have a lot of patience (and I mean A LOT) might want to pass on this one.
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 8
Sound: 9
Value: 8
Tilt: 7
Final Score: 8.0\10 (great)