Puzzle Quest 2 is purported to be a sequel to the first, but this statement would only apply if one only looks at its core gameplay.
This game starts with a simple (non-skippable) movie that shows who are the publisher and the developer for this game, and then follows this up with an intricate and crisp main menu screen. From here, the player can either play the mini-games included in the game, check achievements, start a new quest mode game or continue playing one.
The quest mode is the meat of the game, for it contains the game's story and its main themes (or what lack of them are there). The player starts it by creating a new character, which can be from one of four classes. The player can also select a gender, but this is just a superficial choice and one that only affects the voice-over for the cutscenes of the game.
Speaking of cutscenes, right after the process of character creation, the player gets to watch some sparsely animated but hand-drawn ones. These cutscenes are of course inspired by those in the first game, but they appear to be no more than concept artwork of environments being slid around the screen and zoomed in and out of - much more so than those in the first, which had artwork that at least seemed more relevant to the progression of the story. The (adequately voice-acted) narration, fortunately, does a better job of informing the player of unfolding events.
The player is then thrust into a typical medieval fantasy town, whose greatest (and all-too-familiar) significance is being uncomfortably close to a huge dungeon containing an ancient evil. As can be expected of such towns, it has come under attack by menacing forces. Of course, such a setting is good fodder for a tutorial.
As in the first game, much of what the player can perform is represented via tile-matching sessions. A recurrent session would be combat, which triggers after a "[Player Character] VS [Enemy]" screen. (This screen always pop up without fail and takes a few seconds to go away. It can get old very quickly, considering the staggering number of enemies in the game.)
Both participants match tiles in the form of gems of different colours and skulls of different grades, as well as multiplier tiles that act like gems of any colour. Experience stars and coins had been removed from this game.
To compensate for the loss of the benefits of these tiles, the acquirement of experience and coins now largely depend on both the type of enemy being fought and how long the battle is. There is also a cap to the experience and coinage that can be earned from the battle, and this cap depends on the disparity in power between the player character and the enemy, e.g. beating on hopelessly outmatched Orcs will not be very rewarding.
Whether this omission is disappointing or not is for the player to decide, but combat sessions have been streamlined as a result; any tile-matching that either participant does will be towards defeating the other - and not the farming of loot and experience, which is somewhat out-of-place in combat sessions in the first game.
To make up for the reduced variety of tiles, there is a new one: the Action tile. Matching these tiles is relevant to one of the new game mechanics introduced in Puzzle Quest 2, which is the ability to not just equip arm-held items, but to actively use them in battle as well.
Like in the first game, matching coloured gems results in the gaining of mana of the same colour for the participant who made the match. The mana goes into his/her/its reservoirs, which are much smaller in capacity this time around (whereas in the previous game, their capacities can reach three digits). The different types of mana power skills, which now require less mana in tandem with the reduction in reservoir capacities.
In the previous Puzzle Quest, matching certain gem colours was pointless for certain player character builds, because the mana gained are not needed for the skills that said builds had. Furthermore, the mana requirements for some skills were so high, such that the player had little choice but to mainly focus on matching certain tiles. In Puzzle Quest 2, every gem-matching leads to mana that is useful for at least a couple of skills that any character class has. Of course, the player may only have a limited number of skills to go into battle with, so the player will have to make some choices to optimize oneself for battling specific enemies.
The new combat mechanic mentioned earlier is a result of the overhauling of the inventory system. The player character, and some of the enemies that he/she would face in the game, may now equip apparel such as suits of armor, pieces of jewelry, head-wear and footwear, and arm-held items like weapons, shields and potions (as ludicrous as it is to fight while holding a fragile elixir). Apparel items confer only passive bonuses as can be expected, while arm-held items generally have benefits that need to be manually triggered.
To use arm-held items, the player will usually have to match the aforementioned Action tiles to accrue the necessary amount of action points to use the item and gain its benefits. Weapons, when used, usually results in direct damage to the opponent, while potions usually refill either the user's mana reservoirs or his/her health.
The usage of arm-held weapons may have been introduced to address one of the issues of the first game: combat sessions were too dependent on luck. Unlike mana collected from matching gem tiles, action points can never be depleted without being intentionally spent. They do not completely drain away when there are no more tiles that can be matched, nor be affected by any draining skills. This introduces some much needed certainty to the outcome of combat sessions, especially when there are powerful weapons involved.
Yet, the core gameplay is still very much luck-based. The player may think deeply about his/her next move, but there is still nothing that can be done if the opponent is lucky enough to get tile arrangements that are highly favorable for multiple cascades that fill his/her/its mana reservoirs to overflowing. The opponent AI is no longer as prescient as it was in the previous game, but it can still make seemingly random moves that can result in so many consecutive matches.
It would be understandable if a follower of the Puzzle Quest franchise cries foul - again.
In fact, the cleverer and wiser of players will soon realize that arm-held items are more reliable in winning battles than hoarding enough mana to use skills - which are always subjected to Resist rolls by the opponent, meaning the use of a skill that would have been well-timed can be blocked, if only because the opponent got lucky. For example, the Barbarian class is likely better off hoarding Action points for his/her powerful two-handed weapons instead of trying to defeat the opponent by matching Skulls, the availability of which will always be influenced by luck directly.
While there can be some powerful enemies in the game that may give the player character trouble, the player character always has the option of fleeing away, even in the middle of battle (by exiting the current tile-matching session). (Losing the battle also causes the player character to flee.) This is a very handy feature, but it also takes away much of the sense of challenge of the game; to this reviewer, it was as if the enemies arraigned against the player character are fighting a war of attrition that they are doomed to lose, even if either participant battle always start with full health and default levels of mana (usually zero).
This perception may even worsen to the point that enemies may seem like nuisances that get in the way, if the enemy concerned gets the first move. Coupled with the sometimes prescient enemy AI, enemies who get the first move will sometimes to be able to perform cascade after cascade that gives them an unfair head-start in battle. A fed-up player can easily exit the battle and re-initiate it until the AI stops getting miraculous matches, though this breaks up the immersion of the game.
In addition to combat sessions, the tile-matching mechanic is also used for mini-games, which are mainly encountered when unlocking doors and containers and looting treasure. For unlocking doors, the player is presented with generally three means: spell-casting, lock-bashing or lock-picking.
Spell-casting requires the player to align gems with runes to specific locations on the playing field. Lock-bashing requires the player to make matches to create door tiles which can then be matched to damage the lock. Lock-picking necessitates the lining up and matching of tiles at the bottom-most row.
It would not take long for smarter players to realize that the first two methods are too dependent on luck, especially door-bashing, whereas lock-picking at least has the most important tiles at very certain locations. With the fact that playing any of the three mini-games results in the same (often meager) rewards and access through/to the locked edifice/container (respectively), there would be no incentive to resort to the first two methods over the third.
Fortunately, looting is a much more fun mini-game, as regardless of how it turns out, the player will be rewarded with at least coinage from all that matching of shiny tiles. The magnitude of the rewards from this mini-game (gold and items), on the other hand, depends perhaps a bit too much on luck. An anal-retentive player will have the urge to simply exit an unfavorable looting session halfway and repeat it shortly after, if only to get the most out of a treasure chest.
Gold is of course used to make purchases from vendors, either in the form of new items or upgrades to equippable items in the possession of the player. Unfortunately, many of the equippable items on sale would pale in comparison to those that the player has nurtured through upgrades most, making most trips to vendors other than the blacksmith quite a waste of time.
Materials can never be purchased from any vendor. They are used, together with gold, to effect the aforementioned upgrades. Every subsequent upgrade would be more expensive than the last, but the increase in the capabilities of the upgraded item may be worth the investment. Disappointingly though, some materials are only ever useful for a particular character class, while they can practically only be sold for gold for other classes. While this is a minor gripe, it does feel like a design oversight when battles throughout a certain level of the deep dungeon in Puzzle Quest 2 rewards the player with nothing but more gold in another form.
Certain tile-matching sessions take on even different rules, especially those concerning enemies and obstacles that are quite extraordinary. In these sessions, the player may be faced with an obstruction that can only be removed by matching certain gems or by using special items that replace the arm-held equipment that the player character has.
These special sessions may seem like a good change of pace from the usual fighting, lock-removing and looting, but some of them can be aggravating as the method that the player is forced to use may be far less efficient than the one that he/she is used to. One particular example includes a boss battle that was memorable for all the wrong reasons (more on this later).
Outside of tile-matching activities, there is nothing much to do other than moving the player character around from one point of interest to another within the same area. Everyone else on-screen is a slightly animated but otherwise static sprite. There are also characters to talk to, but they are the only ones that would be talking, not the virtually mute player character.
The graphics of the game, or more precisely its artwork for all its graphics are generally hand-drawn, no longer resembles the anime style in the first game. This is at best only a superficial change in art direction, but the artwork, both static and slightly animated, still fulfill the function of giving everything in the game a distinct look with enough contrast and detail to attract the player's attention. The looks of the tiles and playing field, and any secondary graphics, have also been updated to have more flair.
However, the developers may have regarded the change in art-style and cosmetic sprucing-up of the tile-matching gameplay as an improvement that needed plenty of flaunting. As one clue for this, the animation of tile-matching and its consequences have been greatly extended. For example, matching skulls not only have the player watching the skulls disintegrate, but he/she has to watch the damage being applied to whichever victim (by having the numbers plastered over their portraits), watch the number being altered by any blocking modifiers (AND watch it reduce digit by digit) and then watch the number being subtracted away from the victim's hitpoint counter.
What could have been resolved in just a mere second has been stretched to five seconds. The same annoyance also occurs when either combatant uses their skills or weapons, the animations and sound clips for which cannot be skipped completely at all (and these are merely recycled from the "Player VS Enemy" screen).
To the developers' credit, it does appear that a gem-matching cascade will cause the numbers to stack first before they are applied to whichever character's statistics. Yet, it appears that they have not included the option to bypass these inconsequential animations and sound clips altogether, if only as an option for the player to speed sessions up.
The player can sometimes make his/her move during the enactment of such animations after a gem-matching, but all that fairy dust, magical essence, shrapnel and/or text being generated and flowing all over on-screen pretty much obscure the playing field. Unless the player has fantastic short-term memory, he/she will have to wait for all that excess of graphics to fade away before being able to see how the next move can be made.
The sound design of the game also has the same qualities as its graphical design: almost overbearing. Matching tiles and causing cascades, especially those for skulls, can cause so much cacophony of things breaking apart, being smashed and a disembodied voice uttering praises, so much so that the player would not be able to hear the contrastingly subdued sound clip that indicates that it is now the player's turn to make a move.
The music tracks are fortunately decent to listen to and are very appropriate with the themes of the game.
Story- and theme-wise, the game designers have used the background and lore that had been established in the first game, but at best this association is merely presented in a tangential manner; Puzzle Quest 2 might as well be a different game instead of a sequel.
If the story, which is essentially about would-be heroes venturing into a dungeon to destroy yet another ancient evil, does not suggest so already, the game perhaps resort to one too many stereotypes, more so than just the mythical fantasy ones popularized by Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons.
One of the boss battles, which involves a certain mythical bovine monster removes the player's favored arm-held items and replaces them with the cliched matador/torero red-flag. There were also several pop culture references (& references to games that inspired its designs), but while they were witty, they were ill-placed. An example is a reference to one of the more talkative and persistent protagonists of the Diablo series that was made by a character that had been incarcerated and tortured in this game, if only because he looks terrifically similar to said character in Diablo.
This reviewer's impression of this game is that while Puzzle Quest 2 stays true to the fun match-three mechanics and executable abilities that have been established in the first game, it does not offer a story that is as compelling as the first and does not utilize said mechanics for more variety in gameplay that has actual weight. The unnecessary graphical and aural flair also gets in the way of gameplay.
In conclusion, if a player is expecting the game mechanics of the first Puzzle Quest, then he/she will not be disappointed. However, one should not hope for significant improvements and innovations to the formula that had been established in the first game.