Puzzle em to death!
OK, I tried to put a brave face on it, but I was depressed by the Sims 3 delay. So I was delighted when I realized that another game I’ve been looking forward to for some time — Puzzle Quest: Galactrix — is coming out at the end of the month (look for it Feb 24, initially on PC, XBLA and Nintendo DS, though it will most likely wind up on every platform in the known universe). This one’s a space opera called “Puzzle Quest: Galactrix”, and if it’s anything like its predecessor, it could keep me distracted for a good long time. You can get the flavor of it right now: there’s a playable online combat demo and a gameplay demo available from standard download sites (I got it here).
The first Puzzle Quest game, Challenge of the Warlords, was a blend of a match-three puzzle game — think Bejeweled — with a full-fledged open-world RPG. From the RPG side, the game has it all: a class system, a long, deep main quest and lots of optional sidequests, a party system with party member specific questlines, expandable player stronghold, town sieges, mounts, crafting and more. All executed with graphics consisting mostly of still 2D paintings, and a combat engine provided by a competitive version of the puzzle game… which also, in numerous variations, serves as the crafting system, the mount taming system, the spell training system and so on.
Odd though it sounds, PQ CotW was a surprise hit. It started as a handheld game (hence the lo-tech graphics) but quickly spread to consoles and the PC. A couple of versions had an expansion, “Revenge of the Plague Lord”, which doubled the number of classes, raises the level cap and adds a large new region. Although it sounds like a “casual” title, it has very broad appeal, with my hardest-core shooter-playing, WoW-raiding gamer friends all getting sucked in by it. I suspect the secret is the combination of two different types of compelling gameplay: addictive puzzling and compelling “just one more before bed” questlines.
Galactrix takes the same formula and moves it into space… dropping the conventions of the high-fantasy RPG genre and replacing them with sci-fi conventions (think Freelancer, Mass Effect, or Spore’s space phase). As in those games, there’s a huge galactic map, with jump gates connecting dozens of star systems, which contain shops, stations, minable asteroids, and other features. The game is classless — you develop your skills as you see fit. Instead of spells you have weapons you can equip your ship with, and you can even aquire additional ships (up to three), letting you tailor your weapons systems for particular enemy types.
In the demo, you can get four crew members, three of whom open up minigames: mining, crafting and hacking. Mining (as well as combat) nets you resources which can be traded at space stations, and involves a minigame where you have to match resource tiles to collect a specified number of three resources. Crafting makes new weapons for your ship; the minigame has you match colored tiles to create components, and match the component tiles with each other to collect them. Hacking opens up jump gates, and is achieved by matching colored tiles in a specific color order with a timer ticking.
The puzzle combat system is similar Challenge of the Warlords, with a few differences which combine to make for more dynamic play. The tiles are now hexagonal, which means you can match in three directions instead of two. You also have some control over how tiles fill in the holes: they will “fall” in the direction of the tile you moved (in the default arrangement, there are items and locations that can change the game’s “physics”). These two features give the player significant new strategic opportunities and make it livelier. You’ll spend less time looking for a move… ANY move… and more time weighing which of your options is most advantageous.
Finally, since this is a space game, there have to be shields to destroy before you can damage a ship’s hull. The blue tile color serves to replenish shields; the rest of the tiles function like their counterparts in CotW. Red, yellow and green tiles provide various flavors of energy which are used to power your items, just like mana/spells in CotW; white and purple tiles provide two different kinds of experience, for regular and “psi power” leveling; and mines, like the original skulls, do direct damage to the enemy. Coins are gone; in Galactrix, your income derives from the mining/trading sim.
The demo gives a good feel for the game’s flavor. I played it through four or five times; my only complaint was that it’s far too short ;) It certainly heightened my anticipation for the full game. In fact at this point I’m enthused enough that I picked up the CotW expansion on XBLA, to play till Galactrix comes out; more about the expack later.
