Don't listen to the negative reviews. If you liked the original, you're gonna love this. That being said, my review is targeted solely towards people who already played Puzzle Quest. A lot my love stems from nostalgia, so if you're new to this game/genre, maybe listen to someone else. I've sunken hundreds of hours into this game back on XBLA, I literally couldn't stop playing, it was always that feeling of "one more round". I'm having a VERY similar experience with the remake, having to force myself to stop so because it's 1 a.m. and I have to go to work in 5 hours. I don't even like match-3-games that much lol! There's just something about Puzzle Quest that hooks me to no end. I really REALLY hope they do Puzzle Quest 2 next. I'd like to follow up on a few things I've seen people say on here and also mention a few things I noticed myself. "The enemies are blatantly cheating and constantly winning!" Unless this statement comes from a previous patch or your build for some weird reason completely sucks, I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I play this while being heavily sleep deprived, miss lots of opportunities for 4-gem-rows and still win most of my games, even if i switch from normal to hard difficulty. At level 10 I bought a random shield for 1000g (which is nothing) that heals me for 15 if I match 5 gems. I'm 80% sure this wasn't in the original. Do you know how insanely OP that is with spells like "turn all X gems into yellow" or "double all blue gems"? Tell me again how you're losing almost every fight. And the equipment you get just keeps getting crazier. I'm 3/5 through the game and haven't had any major issues. Yeah, you probably WILL have rounds that look incredibly unfair, where you're going to lose by a landslide, but not only are those very rare, those have always been part of the game, the AI has always behaved like this. If there's a 4/5-match reachable without a combo, they will take it 99 out of 100 times. Like, what are you expecting? Gems dropping ONLY in YOUR favor, all the time? Winning every round while enemies get no shot at all? Do you maybe rather wanna play Candy Crush or something? "AI went first, got combo after combo, I went AFK to make tea, came back and my hp was 0" Yeah, okay man. 0.000001% chance of this actually happening, you might want to start playing the lottery. Unless you show some proof I call bullsh!t. "AI ART! AI ART! 🚨🚨🚨🚨 GAME SUCKS NOW!" I'm not a fan of AI slop either, but like, calm down man. Artists are expensive. That being said most of the graphics in the remake look the same to me, except for the higher resolution. I find AI art most of the time easy to spot, but here I really couldn't tell you. If there is, it's done incredibly well so I couldn't care less. "The random gems that drop onto the table aren't actually random, the game cheats!" Well yeah no sh!t. The game engine HAS to calculate some of it beforehand and might know in advance what the next few drops are going to look like. This is a slot machine. Yes, it's mostly rigged, but 90% in the players favor. If it was truly random you'd had constant mana storms (boardclear, no moves left) and the general experience would suck a huge rooster. ------------- In general I feel like most of these reviews come from people who either never played Puzzle Quest before or simply are in a different spot in life right now. The original released almost 20 years ago , people. It was a chaotic, grindy and sometimes frustrating mess - and it still is, in all of its glory. You were a younger person back then with more patience and energy. Maybe these type of games just aren't for you anymore, that's totally okay. ------------- Now for some more personal stuff. The Bad / The Meh [*]Class selection interface is a bit better but still sucks. You get shown the first spell you learn, and the last one on max level... so what about the ~15 in between? I wanna see them too before picking a class. I certainly can't remember all of that stuff from ages ago and the wiki is... well, not great. I also shouldn't NEED to look at the wiki for this. Why do I have to create a new character first in order to look at all the skills he got? Please change this! [*]Variety in how your character looks has actually gone down, to like 12 or so. Not a dealbreaker but it would be nice to have some more options. [*]Spell casting animations feel boring or off. My static character slides into the picture, her staff pointed at the enemy while the spell I cast is called something like "Shoot arrow" and the enemy just loses some HP. At least show a small arrow animation hitting the enemy picture or something. I'm aware animating every single spell is too much but surely this can be made a bit less nothingy somehow. Something like the weapon attack animation in Puzzle Quest 2 which felt incredibly satisfying, especially on a critical hit. [*]No mod support. I feel like this would improve the game even more but I'm also not sure how easy this is to implement in a game like this. [*]Playing field doesn't differ in size. In the original you had some enemies where you had a waaay bigger arena, making the match a lot more interesting and chaotic. Sometimes there were rows of stones you had to blast with +5 skulls. I'm hoping they're still in the game and that I just haven't encountered them yet. They were a lot of fun, removing them would have been a very bad design choice. If I'm wrong on this I'll update the review. Update: Well, the big arenas are unfortunately gone. 3/4 through the game and haven't seen a single one. Major bummer! The Good [*]Game looks fantastic now. High resolution and improved UI looks amazing on my big TV. [*]New music tracks! [*]New class with cool mechanic! [*]In the original, once there were no possible moves left on the board, it was cleared and both opponents had their mana set to zero. Most of the time this felt frustrating, especially after you've spent 10 turns building up your mana reserves. Can't remember the old name but now it's called "Mana storm" - the board still gets reset, but you keep all of your mana . As a small bonus all of the cleared gems get converted into mana and the total is split up between the two opponents, being added to their mana pool (which isn't that much, but still... very nice). This has been one of the best changes so far. [*]3/3 = Five in a row! I don't know how to explain this one, so just imagine these two formations being the same-color of gems: o o o o o o o o o o The upper L-shaped one now also counts the same as the one below, being a "five-of-the-same" and creating a wildcard. Great change. So there you have it. If you were a sucker for the original I'd recommend it to you big time. Looking forward to Puzzle Quest 2!
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