Review: Puzzle Quest: Galactrix

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix‘s last boss took me 5 minutes to beat. Beating the mini game that separated me from the ending of the game took me 20. Everything that is wrong with PQ:G is in those sentences, read together or apart.

If I worked for developer Infinite Interactive, it would be very easy to make a likable demo for the game Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. In fact, the demo for the game is what convinced me to make a purchase. A vertical slice of the “core” gameplay reveals a puzzle game more complex than previous effort Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, a science fiction setting more appealing to my palette, and hints of an even deeper RPG experience. And that’s the problem with demos. Infinite Interactive doesn’t fulfill any of the promises that vertical slice makes.

For the uninitiated, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is a hybrid, a combination of RPG and puzzle game. Where in a standard RPG battles might be played out in real time or through a turn based system, the fights in PQ:G play out via a vs puzzle game. In the previous game in this series, the puzzle was a simple grid based color matching gem puzzle game, incredibly similar to Bejeweled.

While the colors and the gems have stuck around, gone is the grid, replaced instead with a hexagonal puzzle board (and hexagonal gems to go with it.)  In a mechanical nod to the game’s sci-fi space setting, the gems that enter the board to replace those matched do so from the direction of your last move. Some gems do damage when matched, and others go into your energy reserves. You augment the simple color matching by using equipment, powered by that collected energy. Some equipment changes the condition of the playfield, hits your enemy with status effects or direct damage, or buffs your own abilities. In comparison to PQ:CotW, Galactrix offers a tougher, more intellectually stimulating combat puzzle. The “core” gameplay is better.

You may have noticed that I used quotation marks around the word core again. I’m not doing that to signal that I’m referring to the critical convention of core gameplay (the way driving feels in Midnight Club, or shooting in Call of Duty.) The problem is that what was pitched as Galactrix’s core gameplay to the consumer, to the player even as he plays, isn’t the actual unified experience that he gets. In the first five hours of play, I’d had a handful of these chess-like back and forth, down to the wire space ship shoot outs, and I’d done dozens of gate hacking.

What’s gate hacking? At this point, it would be easier to say “trust me on this one, it’s complicated to understand, it just doesn’t work.” But it’s worth at least a brief explanation – if only so that would be developers learn this lesson well.

Gate hacking is one of a handful of minigames that exists (in theory) to act as a break from the “core” game, and as a place to sharpen some of the other skills involved with playing the “primary”, combat-centric element. These games work very well in some cases. The minigame for finding out rumors on one of the game’s myriad of planets focuses on not ending a turn with a certain set of gems matching. This easily mirrors a condition often found in the battle segment of the game: Make sure not to leave your opponent with a strong move. It’s like learning not to limit your king’s escape options in chess. It’s relevant, educational, and fun.

Gate hacking? Gate hacking is none of those. You see, the game’s broad scale is divided up into solar systems. Each system is connected to the others via gates. You hack these gates by performing a timed mini game where you make a number of gem color combinations as the game requires it (matching red gems when it says red, blue when it says blue, etc.) The time limit is a challenge no where else in the game. Your turns in combat aren’t timed, nor when crafting items or mining for resources. Worse, gate hacking happens way more than combat for the first half of the game. And, it punishes you for doing well – with combos often draining important time away form the clock. Worst? It erases your progress when it feels like it, making you re-open gates that you (in some cases) just opened up a few minutes of play ago.

If this was the only problem then I could at least recommend the PC game: this problem was almost immediately fixed by fan mods. Unfortunately for Infinite Interactive, it isn’t a lone problem at all.

In PQ:CotW, the player made a decision at the beginning of their game to play through as one of several fantasy archetypes (knight, wizard, etc.) These classes were effectively a collection of skills that your character got as you went up in level, which in turn suggested to you how you should build up your statistics. If you played the druid class, which often used green and yellow gems to power its skills, you simply dump points into those skills when you level up.

In Galactrix there are no classes, there are only ships and equipment. In some respects, this is freeing. Anyone who’s so much as read a few table-top RPG manuals knows that classless systems can be very fun because they allow for unique player driven characters that rarely feel cookie cutter. In a system well designed you’d pick a ship that fits your playstyle (fast with low defense, vice versa?) and then equipment to go with it, matching up all around to make a coherent variation on play. However, in Galactrix the player not only has no restrictions, but also has no direction. Without a clear idea of what sort of equipment is driven by what skills, an inexperienced player could easily spend their skill points poorly.

An experienced Puzzle Quest player isn’t out of the forest either. Because of mid game balancing issues, a single combination of powers rises well above the others (PROTIP: If you have two parts that can skip an enemy for multiple turns, you win!), their early game decision to focus on skills that don’t use that combination was less than efficient. These problems are compounded: you have a game with no classes, a single broken combo, and a few encounters that seem made exactly so that you’ll figure that combination out. Once you have the skill points necessary to keep that combo going, the core gameplay is reduced. It becomes elementary. It becomes pre-aerobics calisthenics, leaving all that damned gate hacking as the bulk of the work out.

On top of gameplay fuss, the narrative is filled with sci-fi tropes and space fantasy cliche. Yes there are clones, and A.I., and furry creatures that love to steal. And if BioWare had written all of their dialog, it might’ve been brilliant. Instead, and I swear I’m not kidding, the evil would-be-Nietzchean antagonist reaches the lowest low I’ve ever seen in a video game. His dialog reads “(EVIL LAUGHTER.)” Also, as a guy with a philosophy degree, can I just take a moment and say to devs: stop basing your villains off of SparkNotes.com summaries of nihilism and existentialism. It isn’t cute.

If the word “compelling” has become taboo, am I still allowed to say that a game isn’t that? That these factors synthesize to create a repugnant package. It simply isn’t addictive. It is the antithesis. I became enamored with closing the game in frustration – even when I was winning. I was angry even in having fun. I was mad at the game even when I was admiring the sound design (different colored gem combos produce different and appropriate sound cues), music (a little Babylon 5 and a little Firefly, the swelling music that plays when you are about to win is especially good), and visual aesthetics. Even though I really like some of the gameplay differences between this and the developer’s previous effort (of special note is the new shield mechanic that makes the early battles real nail biters,) the fact is that I am constantly overwhelmed by a desire to stop playing, now. The “core” gameplay is like a check for  a gazillionjillionquillion dollars: sure that sounds a lot of dough, it’s a shame it’s a fake number.

As such it isn’t a game I can recommend someone playing. If you think the idea of Puzzle RPG is intriguing, check out the original game, but whatever you do not board this ship.

Completed single player campaign on Nintendo DS

Players: 1-2

Platforms: XBOX 360/PS3/PC/Nintendo DS

ESRB: E10+