A painfully shallow story is easily saved by addictive gameplay and bucketloads of content.
The basic premise to Puzzle Quest is to create a character from a bunch of the usually fantasy cliche's and save the world from an evil undead guy. You travel from city to city picking up sidequests on the way and battling all kinds of monsters as you do. You battle the monsters not in a traditional way though, but by playing a game similar to Bejewled with your opponent where matching three or more skulls in a row damages your enemy chipping away at their health. Various other coloured beads can be matched on the grid causing your character to gain various mana of corresponding colours which allow you to cast spells with a variety of effects. By beating your opponent you gain experience/money etc and you can level up to gain new skills unlocking new in-puzzle abilities. The premise is simple, yet fiendishly addictive and deep once you realize the full potential of what you can do in "combat". I've never had so much fun matching up coloured blobs and that matching up coloured blobs in itself can be fun is a testament to how good this game really is.
While travelling around the world map beating enemies there are a few added features to improve the games depth and immersion. You have allies who join your party who can give you a bonus against certain enemies and access to new quests. You can build a base where you can interrogate captured enemies, forge new items and learn new abilites. You can shop, hunt for spell ingredients and watch a variety of simple but occasionally amusing cutscenes based around the games main story and subquests. The story itself is awful, but youll be having so much fun with the core game that really is pretty irrelevant in the long run.
The game is also long, so you get great value for money and while it's challenging does not fall into the gap of being too frustrating or difficult when you need to battle a monster a few times. I can't quite work out how much time I've spent on this game but it must be at least 30 hours as I started playing it in January.
Overall I feel Puzzle Quest is my favourite XBLA game in ages and with added content on the way I can't wait to play some more.