Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

Intro
The recipe is simple:

Preheat the oven to 350
Take Bejewled
Take an average RPG
Place Bejeweled and RPG in a bowl, cover it, and really shake it up.
Bake for 10 minutes on some sort of metal pan or whatever, and serve.

See? Simple! With such a simple formula, it's hard to imagine this game not rocking your pants off. It has enough content for the casual gamer and the hardcore RPGer. With the content, the gameplay should follow.

The premise of the story is that the undead are wreaking havok, orcs have become an organized group of slavers, the dragons have gone missing, and I'm sure there's more to the mix that I haven't encountered yet. You get too pick your class from one of four classes: Druid, Knight, Warrior, and Wizard. Your only other choice of customization is the portrait you pick for any of the classes. One of the portraits looks suspiciously like the character B.T. from the anime series .Hack//Sign. Another character kind of looks like Bear on the intro screen from the same series. Strange, no? Anyway, the spells and skills you that you learn as you level up is entirely dependent on the class that you choose. The spells and skills are only used during combat.

Anyway, after you pick your character the game starts. You have to go through a couple of practice missions and the game takes off. You get simple options like to build your citadel with the gold you earn, buy items, listen to rumors (rumors are a half-hearted attempt to add more depth to the plot), or get quests. The battles are not random, so you know exactly who you fight when you approach. The battles themselves take a very 'Bejeweled' feel, but this is where the game does a lot of things wrong, which I'll cover soon. As you advanced through the game you can buy items which will take up one of four different slots, gain experience to level (and with that you are given a set amount of points to increase some of your seven attributes). After some time you gain a few companions along the way who help you out in different ways at the start of each battle if their special ability applies.

Combat: Cons
Before I go into more detail about the other stuff, I really need to mention the combat system. This is a point of contention with me. The combat works like so: You are given a grid of 8x8, and on that grid can be anywhere from up to eight different types of objects. Five of the objects are for mana, which is added to one of your four types, one object is gold, one is a purple star for experience, and the last object is a skull (there's also special skulls that do bonus damage, but I still consider them to be skulls none the less). Match three or more of a kind to get a desired effect. If you combine four or five, you get an extra turn. If you match only three. Your turn ends. If you make an illegal move, you lose five health and your turn ends. In order to do damage, you either need to use your available spells/skills, or match the skull pieces on the tile-set. Once you are or your opponents HP is reduced to zero, the turn ends.

My first gripe is that when you go to match five objects for the bonus, they need to be vertical or horizontal. Two of them cannot be veritcal, the other horizontal, and you pop in the corner piece. You still get the points for doing said action, but none of the bonuses.

Next we have how the objects keep appearing. As you match up objects, the ones around it drop down, and more appear at the top. It honestly seems to favor the AI. Instead of programming a more challenging AI, they decided to program it so that the AI can potentially take 20 turns before you take one, all because of how the objects fall into place. And yes, it does occur often (maybe not always 20 turns, but more often than not it's around five or six). When you're trying to defeat certain special monsters, this makes it impossible to do so. They're so ungodly powered up after their 20th turn that any time they match skulls to damage you, they're doing 30 or more points of damage at a time to you. How can you compete when you're doing 7 damage with the same method? What makes this worse is that you're penalized if you make an illegal move. That's not challenging, it's just impossible.

Losing or winning a battle doesn't really excite me. If you win a battle, you move on. If you lose a battle, you keep all gold and experience you've earned and can try again. Give me some awesome victory music. As you progress through the game, you find yourself fighting battles that you only need to fight through quest. Not necessarily bad as it takes away from the tedium of grinding, but it still makes you go "meh". It's like, why bother?

Combat: Pros
There are good things about the combat system in general. You can lay siege to other cities and capture them. Capturing a city will produce gold at the city every month (which is about 3 or 4 moves). You do need to visit the city to pick up the gold. You can also access your citadel from these other cities.

You can also capture your enemies after you have defeated three of that kind before. The group breaks down into two different groups. The first group is for spells, and the second group are mounts. Once you have built your citadel appropriately, you can learn the spells and train your mounts. The spells you learn will cost more than they normally would since you are not a class who normally has those spells. With your mounts, you can start to avoid combat if you have trained them up to a high enough level. The higher the level, the stronger of an enemy you can avoid. This makes travel across the kingdom much less of a hassle. Your different mounts also grant you different bonuses. One bonus is a spell, and one bonus is an attribute modifier. The spell however does cost more than it naturally would. The attribute modifier becomes better as you level your mount.

And the other neat things about the combat system is that once in combat, the moves you make can either help or harm the AI. When you're not training your mounts, or doing the single player option, you are not timed. This gives you ample opportunity to plan out your next move. If you manage to match up four or five of a kind, you get a bonus. The bonus usually enhances the effect. Match up five of a kind, you get an even bigger bonus and a special object that can be used in conjunction with four of the other objects. This special object gives a bonus as well.

Citadel
The citadel is a neat place. You can only customize it by so much, but once you max it out, it becomes a good staple for you in the game. You can train mounts, learn spells, match runes to craft items, or train your skills. Training mounts and learning spells has already been covered. Crafting items can only be done with runes. Different runes give different effects. The more powerful the rune, the harder it is to craft. Runes never go away as you use them, so feel free to experiment. Training your own skills only costs gold. The higher the skill, the more gold it costs.

You can also add other things to your citadel to help decrease the chance of a rebillion in cities you've captured, but I'm not entirely sure how useful it is. It certainly doesn't hurt to get it, as upgrading it is cheap, and once you've progressed through the game getting gold is so damn easy.

Weapons
The way your items work is this: There's an one category that lumps shield, boots, books, and other useless items into one category dubbed "other". There's a category for "weapons", a category for helms and necklaces, and a category for cloaks and chest/torso armor. Four categories in total. Each item has varying effects. I have honestly stuck with pretty much the same items that I received at the beginning of the game. At this point I can probably change out my necklace for something else (it just gives me more gold during battle), but the other three items I've since nearly the beginning. The item selection and their abilities just don't seem to be fun. If a little more depth to them would have been added, this could have made the game much much deeper.

Conclusion
The only reason I care to even keep playing the game is that the plot has me mildly interested to see what happens next. I realize the goal was to keep it simple enough for the "casual" gamer, yet have enough depth to attract a more hardcore game. The problem here is that the combat system is too big of a pitfall for the game. It can be so irritating that you literally need to step away and take a breather or two to cool off. I can't imagine a casual gamer enjoying that. I'm sure they would have loved some balance there too! The game is currently only $20 and it does offer hours upon hours of gameplay, but in the end, is it really worth it? I honestly cannot say that it is. I will finish it to the end, but I imagine some sort of sour taste being left in my mouth when I'm done.