A great game, not without flaws..
Puzzle Quest is the popular online game Bejeweled, but with a point. You follow a story, challenges, quests and characters that lead you on a full journey into magic, history and imagination.
When facing opponents, you each take a turn moving the jewels. You can use the standard "line up the 3 skulls" attack, or get fancier with magic spells that do more damage, skip the opponents turn, or heal yourself, for example.
As in any RPG themed game, you build up your characters strengths, abilities, magic powers, items, animals to ride on and meet people that will help you along the way. All in all, it is a fantastically deep and involved game, far more depth than I had imagined.
There are however, some flaws. For the most part, these will not take away from your enjoyment of the game, they're more like a rough edge here and there that you can put up with.
First of all, there are random black screen hangs. Your game is periodically saved automatically, so when this happens, you can reboot, and pick up where you left off.
There are graphic issues, the DS version obviously being the weakest but for this type of game, the graphics will not detract from the experience all that much. However, there are glitches that happen. 2 layers on top of each other on the map for example will happen randomly. You can try refreshing with the X button, but it won't always help. Also, when you line up 4 or 5 gems in a row, a text graphic will pop up and fade out telling you that you have a free turn. Sometimes 2-3 of these will all pop up together and get a little glitchy, not fading out properly. This is especially true when forging a new item from runes.
The actual graphic in question could have been done a lot nicer as well. It is a picture of text, whereas a custom made font would have looked a lot cleaner in this regard.
There are some sound issues, such as the music not being set to the volume you left it at the last time you switched your system off. The music itself is somewhat clicky due to sloppy loop points in some of the sampled instruments.
The local multiplayer (no wifi) could have been done a little cleaner, like a "rematch" button rather than disconnecting both players and returning them to the main screen after each match.
There are a few other details, but I'll leave it at that. This game is fun, addictive and well worth the money. Once you get used to the rough edges, you'll be losing hours of your hard earned time in this game.
Lets hope Infinite Interactive takes some of these points to heart when working on their next puzzle RPG, Galactrix.