Much of the skill of original 'Puzzle Quest' replaced by extremely frustrating lucky draw boards. Fail.
I'm absolutely livid with the luck based nature of the hacking game. With a name like 'Puzzle Quest' (and based on its predecessor) you would expect gaming scenarios where thought and careful planning would generally earn you victory. Not so with the hacking 'puzzles.' You're absolutely at the mercy of the quite rare clusters of like-colored gems. Very little skill, very much lottery. If I'm this angry at the 'easy' puzzles, it is in the best interest of every living and material object around me to quit the game immediately now.
Fail. Fail. Fail.
In fact, the whole design of this game is a fail. You want to know why everyone was surprised at the sudden release date for this game? It's like for movies that the producing studio knows is going to get critically reamed. They don't allow critics to see it ahead of release so as many of the general public will see it before the bad press gets out. They wanted to sneak out this pooper so that those of us excitedly watching and waiting for it on sites like Direct2Drive would crap our pants and buy it before we read the negative reviews.
So far in about an hour of playing, I've only had 2 (yes, seriously, only 2) enemy encounters. The rest has been terrible 'mining' puzzles where I've only won maybe 2 of 10 (I sure hope they respawn) and the aforementioned shpoottastic hacking puzzles. And just terrible ship flying around animations.
Fail. Fail. Fail. I am so disappointed with this steaming load I was handed today.