Awesome. I can wait till then for sure.
Hopefully it turns out good, but I’m pretty sceptical from all those other wretched Puzzle games they made after the first Puzzle Quest.
I’m liking the mechanics so far. There’s a lot more powerful spells and effects, and a lot fewer things to match that don’t make any progress in the battle, so battles tend to end much sooner. If you can build up the right mana you can do a ton of damage really quickly.
Is it possible to stalemate in combat and have the board reset? Galactrix gets a bad rap around here but it was a solid game with some really interesting mechanics, and ditching stalemates in combat was a HUGE improvement over PQ’s combat.
How many “alternate” puzzle games have you been exposed to?
I’ve played Galatrix and Puzzle Kingdoms. It is still possible to have no moves resulting in the board reseting, which drains everyone’s mana. But since the mana is so much more powerful this time around, this is actually a significant factor in how you play - you take a risk by waiting a couple more turns for a more powerful effect.
Well, it was a big, constant, risk in PQ too. The issue is that it just stupidly drags out combats and makes them grindy. The lesser issue was that there were a number of PQ builds that relied on building up big mana stores (and buffing, and building them up some more where needed), and it certainly disrupted that (to the point where it could radically alter a combat, which was lame).
Yeah, it does all those thing in PQ2, but the difference is that the battle itself wastes no time, so there are fewer mana drains, there’s less downside to just firing your ability when you can to avoid getting screwed by a mana drain, and there’s still action points, which don’t drain when a mana drain happens. Plus, like I said, combat is faster so the occasional interruption doesn’t mean that a fight drags on for another 100 turns. Basically, not having gold and xp as matchable things means that you pretty much always make some progress on your turn.
I don’t like how they replaced their PQ1’s equipment system where different equipments have different effects to an armor system. so you get more equipment slots, but most of them does nothing but just add defense.
The faster combat thing sounds promising, though I will be curious to see how that holds up over the course of the game (as combats went from kinda longish to really long in PQ). Keep the impressions coming!
I would have never guess that Tom would prefer Galactrix to PQ! I prefer it as well, although the CONSTANT need to play that hacking game got a bit old. I didn’t mind the game, but I just didn’t feel like I needed to play it hundreds of times and then even more if the gate got closed up again.
Still, as far as the base board, Galactrix wins hands down. PQ was a straight up Bejeweled clone, and Galactrix had a much more nuanced hexagonal system.
Bael
Hit lvl 26 on my assassin, there are a lot of combat in this game, but as far as duration goes, most battles last maybe 2-3 minutes right now.
Any more feedback on this game from the early adopters? Does it have the fiendish addictiveness of the original PQ or does it get stale quick?
All of the spinoff puzzle games after PQ really demonstrated that the people behind the original PQ didn’t actually know why their game was so good so I’m a bit hesitant to grab PQ2 without some feedback.
I tried the 360 demo but was a bit put off by the early tutorial bits. Does it get better as the game goes on?
My wife and I have been playing this pretty often since we got it a week ago. I like it a lot; it’s pretty much as addicting as the first, though the structure takes some getting used to. You have many more options in terms of weapons and armor and jewelry/potions, and you can upgrade stuff as well as buy and sell it. There are minigames for damn near everything, from searching rooms to opening doors to disarming traps. I kind of prefer the structure of the first game but this one does move faster and the fights are generally less tedious as you get into opponents with lots and lots of health. Definitely worth the money though.
I’m am mildly disappointed so far. It’s true there’s no longer gold/xp on the board, but now you have 5 types of mana + action + skulls, so it’s still 7 types of blocks, and I think gridlock/whatever is still just as common. It’s neast that action points don’t reset when this happens, but it’s still really obnoxious. Also, they left in match 4 = bonus turn, which I think is a mistake.
I think the rest of my complaints stem from having gotten it on the DS.
I’ve been playing the XBLA version of PQ2 since it released last week, and I feel it’s mostly an improvement. I like the dungeon crawling, and the minigames for things like unlocking doors and stuff makes PQ2 feel a bit like an early PC RPG where every action is resolved using a Bejeweled variant instead of a dice roll. The combat seems to be paced much better than the first game, and there haven’t been any real protracted battles that I’ve seen. As Tom has pointed out on Fidgit, the AI still doesn’t know how to play the game, really, but it hasn’t bothered me too much.
I only really have two major complaints. First, when you’re playing any of the minigames, the game board is shrunken down by about 30%. It doesn’t make the game unplayable, but it does make some of the minigames uncomfortable to look at. It’s bizarre and there is no apparent reason for it.
The other complaint would be that class balance seems to be off. The assassin has been a lot of fun to play. Even the early skills are useful and the skill set as a whole has some nice synergy. The barbarian has none of that. The class seems to be designed around 2h weapon damage, but the early skills don’t supplement that strategy in the least and are generally weak to the point of uselessness. It’s just a letdown considering how well-designed I think the assassin class is.
To be clear, we’re playing this on the DS, as we did the first one. It seems to me at least to be the perfect DS game, and I don’t really get the DS hate from some folks. I wouldn’t even consider playing this on the Xbox, as it isn’t engrossing enough to do that, but it’s plenty fine for my DS sessions before bed or when waiting for the oil change or whatever.
I picked it up for the Xbox simply because it’s cheaper and I already have plenty of DS-ware for mobile gaming.
Thoughts so far: As mentioned previously, the fact that all types of gems advance the state of the game in some way helps, but it’s still possible for the board to bog down and wipe out in a mana drain. Likewise, the enemy AI is not very good at playing the game, which rather makes me question whether there was ever a point in having the main puzzle mechanic be a game where two players take turns - if a challenging AI is frustrating and a lucky AI induces rage, why not just make it a fishbowl where you’re fighting your own ability to puzzle? The minigames work fine like that.
So far, I think I preferred the Galactrix hexa-grid for matching gameplay, especially with the gravity tricks and the rule that only a match-5 gave a bonus turn. Galactrix was frustrating if you didn’t realize that clicking the gem on the left and swapping right could give you a different result than clicking the gem on the right and swapping left, even though you would make the same match. If you did realize it, on the other hand, the “gravity” mechanic clicked.
On the other hand, PQ2 equipment/character builds are already more interesting than the Galactrix system where you only had active abilities and there wasn’t any really convincing reason to pile on lots of them. I hit the endgame of Galactrix in a horribly beweaponed battlecruiser that had room for 8 slots, but I only really used 3 or 4 of them because most decent items cost a turn to activate, making for high opportunity costs.
I suspect that “mildly disappointing” or “mediocre” will be the keywords for Puzzle Quest 2. It isn’t actually bad, but it lacks zest. The puzzling and the questing are both OK, and putting those two things together is still a great idea, but not enough so to rescue the game’s lack of polish and excitement.
For only 1200 Microsoft spacebucks, I’m happy with my purchase as a good-enough timewaster, but I would recommend that anyone wanting to quest puzzles on their DS should wait to get it on resale.
Try Gyromancer. That’s the biggest thing that PopCap and SquareEnix got right with that game.
I’ve played about six or eight hours. I’m bored. I don’t really understand why, either. Maybe it’s the music I had on while I was playing. Mostly I just seem to be wandering around and stomping on random entities as an excuse to play Bejeweled. To the game’s credit, I don’t feel as screwed over when the computer rips off a gigantic cascading combination, but it’s still annoying and still the biggest flaw in the game as far as I’m concerned. I think they could probably do with one fewer color of mana too - I’m about halfway up my spell tree (Assassin) and it seems like I’m never adequately resourced for half the crap I want to do. At this point, I’d almost prefer that the skulls were taken off the board completely, you got one “action” a turn that you could spend action points on, and all damage was done through spells and attacks. The multiplier wildcards are also a little extremely unbalanced - I’ve had more than one game that I stomped into oblivion because I happened to line up a x5 on the right color early and then never ran out of that color.
It’s not terrible for fifteen bucks, but I’m not sure I’m going to actually end up finishing it on XBLA.
multiplayer is very, very fun. Tourney mode rocks as does versus.