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Space: The Final Sellout. It’s the first - and usually last - place to go when you’re looking to expand a franchise, at least if you’re a 1970’s Saturday morning cartoon show. The same rule seem to apply to casual games, as Puzzle Quest extends its basic gameplay to another format and takes you a galaxy populated by the usual ridiculous-looking aliens and all-consuming threat. The spinoff game creates a match-3 puzzle that’s more strategic and interesting, but also makes the general playing experience a little less than great.
Blast off after the jump
(A note: Puzzle Quest has a bit of a reputation as a porting whore; it’s appeared on pretty much every single console and device it could manage, most recently sneaking onto the iPhone. While Galactrix is currently only out on PC and DS, it will likely find its way onto the console of your choice in a few months, so just be patient. I’m reviewing the PC version here, which looks pretty good and controls well, but since the graphics and UI are going to be different between the respective ports, I’ll be focusing on the gameplay.)
If you are unaware of Puzzle Quest, the game basically takes the concept of Bejeweled and makes it worth doing. The standard match-3 grid is shared between two opponents, and they each take an action per turn. On your turn, you can either play an action or make a match on the board. Each icon has a function, and when you match them, you either gain some ‘mana’, some experience or coin, or deal damage to your opponent. It’s clever, addicting, and frustrating, and a really good twist on the usual system.
Galactrix follows this same model, but changes both the board and how you acquire your abilities. The board and icons are now hexagon shaped, giving you six directions of movement instead of four, and offer more opportunities to make matches. This wouldn’t be much to get excited about, except that gravity works different in space, and the direction you move the piece to make a match matters. The board will refill in the direction you specified, so it requires some thinking to set up combos and avoid giving your opponent too much to work with. The damaging icons also do a bit more damage on average, you can regain hit points off the board, and the money icons have been replaced with psi point icons, which have very limited usefulness. But overall the battle feels much more dynamic and intense, as well as a tidge more fair as the AI seems to have ‘stupid’ mode enabled most of the time, taking a suboptimal move more often than not.
Unfortunately, you’re not spending the majority of your time in battle like you did in the first game. Early on you’ll get a crew of folks who all unlocked mini-games, mini-games that you will be doing over and over again. They are all variations on the usual match 3 grid. Two minigames requires you match a certain number of tiles before the board locks up, with necessary variations. One requires you to try to clear the board as completely as possible, and a final one requires you to prevent a certain type of icon from matching. Doing these give you goods to sell, new equipment to use, or a lower price at the store, all the usual RPG stuff.
And there’s the jumpgate minigame, which requires you to make a sequence of matches before time runs out. You need to do this minigame whenever you want to unlock a route to another system…which you’ll want to do pretty much constantly, because there are over 70 systems to explore. So roughly 60% of your game experience will be either flying from place to place or playing the jumpgate minigame. And because the timer doesn’t stop whenever you hit a combo, there’s the constant possibility you will fail the challenge because of doing too well. It’s fidgety and annoying the complete lack of control you have, and it’s unfortunate it has such a huge factor in the game.
It’s not the least of the problems. The story, as before, is completely forgettable, only this time gameplay is occasionally interrupted by the same static picture of some douchebag over text that would be passé in a Seattle manifesto. The quests are predictable and the characters are dull. It always feels as if the windowdressing is getting in the way of the gameplay, which is about right for a casual game. They did cut the obnoxious morality choices that were in the first game, which usually gave you a choice of ‘do the right thing and be rewarded handsomely’ or ‘gain a pittance of gold.’
As for your special powers, Galactrix actually makes it harder to perform tricks in combat. While the original Puzzle Quest had a class system, Galactrix forgoes that and instead ties all your abilities to your equipment, meaning that your strategy isn’t tied to something arbitrary, but you also lose a lot of choice because you can only upload 3 or 4 abilities to your ship in the early game, and it takes a long time to make an upgrade. You also have to purchase all your equipment, so a player who isn’t actively improving his gear will continue to use the same abilities for quite a while. I respect their choice to make your rig a lot more customizable, it also goes so far to make the decision too difficult. A little handholding would have been nice.
So while they honed the battle system into something even more fun, they erred on their assumptions of what we’d put up with to get to it. The main game drags between combat, and there’s far too much work into getting properly upgraded and opening up the gigantic map. While it’s very possible to get sucked in while playing, the allure of opening up another star system, shooting down another pirate, it starts to feel like a burden just to load the game up again for another riveting three hours of the exact same puzzle again.
Final Score: C
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