Puzzle Quest: Galactrix

More like Luck Quest: Galucktrix

The Puzzle Quest franchise has been around awhile.  Hell, Galactrix has been around awhile.  If you know what this is, go ahead and skip to the second paragraph.  If not, think Bejeweled, Candy Crush, or any of the billion offshoots of those two games which are themselves offshoots.  The formula is at least 20 years old, though most of said games are all about getting a high score.  As it is not the Atari days, nobody really cares about that any more.  Enter Puzzle Quest.  Each match is a battle, with certain gems damaging your opponent, healing you, or giving you energy to use spells.  It was a really neat idea and it worked pretty well.  There was plenty of grinding to be had, but at least you weren't just slightly increasing a number nobody cares about each time you played.  Well, you were, but this number is your level, and levels are cool.  Galactrix changes the genre a little by making the board a hex grid instead of a...grid grid.  It also takes place in space.  Wow!

See?  Space!

The game isn't all battles though.  Galactrix puts the Quest in Puzzle Quest with gusto.  You start the game with a quest, you do about ten billion quests both main and side, and you finish the game with a quest.  Quest quest quest.  The vast majority of said quests just have you doing things you could do yourself if you wanted to, like taking out a pirate or mining an asteroid.  Still, if you just did those things by yourself you wouldn't get the bonus experience and credits, so there you go.  Plus there's a story.  It's not a great story but if you like reading then you'll be in for a moderate amount of enjoyment.

Let's go back to mining asteroids.  While battles are the primary form of puzzle, there's also hacking, mining, crafting, and probably something else I'm forgetting.  The basic premise of each is the same in that you match a row of three or more of the same tile, but the execution varies slightly.  Battles are turn based affairs where your goal is to drain the enemy's life by matching special "mine" tiles and using abilities.  Mining, on the other hand, has you trying to match resource tiles until you get a certain amount of resources.  Once you meet that amount or run out of valid moves, it's over.  When hacking the game will give you a color of tile to match.  Do that and it'll give you a new one, and so forth until it's satisfied.  This mode has a time limit so you better watch out/not cry/etc.  The different modes do little to break up the monotony inherent to puzzle games but it's better than the alternative.

Look, I'm hacking.

And now for this game's main, extremely egregious flaw.  The luck factor.  With the non-battles it's really not that bad.  Sometimes you'll fail for no reason but it doesn't happen all that often and you get to retry immediately.  But the battles, man.  The battles.  You see, the game cheats.  Complaining about the computer cheating sounds like an unprofessional gripe, especially because every game cheats to some degree in order to bridge the gap between human intelligence and crappy AI, but this is beyond the realm of balancing and into something far less fun.  Galactrix actively gives your opponent mine matches.  I realized ahead of time that this could just be confirmation bias, but I paid close attention.  The amount of "wow what serendipity" matches the computer gets far, far outpaces yours.  This would be alright if it just added extra challenge to the game, but it doesn't.  All it does is make every other battle a loss you simply have to wait out, and as a result I dread playing against an enemy that isn't ridiculously weak.

The worst part of your hard-coded antiluck is that you can't do much about it, especially in the beginning.  It's not like you can stop the game from conveniently dropping a nicely set up row of mines whenever you get a match.  The best defense is to make no moves at all.  There's a large assortment of abilities you can use, most of which will end your turn.  For example, one of the first you get is a laser that does a small amount of damage and burns up some of your red energy.  Even though it barely does anything it's still better than risking giving your opponent some mines which will allow it to do 15 or more damage to you.  The exceptions are matching mines yourself, making four/five in a row, or getting a chain of matches.  I guess in a way you could say it's strategy, but it doesn't feel fun.  It feels like you're playing poker against someone who gives himself a card of his choice every time you draw.

The previous turn my opponent got a chain of eight matches.  This was his first turn.

But there are good aspects too.  Once you get past the smell factor of having to play like an idiot, there's a certain satisfaction to taking down an opponent who had eviscerated you in one turn 45 seconds ago.  Plus, while match three games are okay, it's very nice to switch things up as often as Galactrix does.  Every few battles you'll upgrade your ship in some way or gain a level or what have you.  The game never does a bitchin 180, but that wouldn't be a good thing in a game like this anyway.  It's like an MMO.  The point is to slowly build your strength so you can take on greater challenges.  The pace is steady and the rations are filling, like a casual game should be.

The infrastructure of the game, which is the wrong term but I'm going with it anyway, is solid.  The graphics are all quite crisp and clean, the UI interesting but not busy, the sounds...futuristic.  It was all done by Infinite Interactive, an obscure developer who haven't really made a name for themselves outside the Puzzle Quest franchise.  I owned Puzzle Quest 2 for the DS which was similarly polished.  It didn't, however, give the AI an unfair advantage.  I'm not sure what went wrong here.  Was it a conscious decision gone awry?  I don't remember the first Puzzle Quest being horribly easy.  It's a disappointing blemish on an otherwise good game.  Galactrix isn't a AAA title by any means, but it's definitely king among its kind.

Current Price: $10

Verdict: Get it on sale or try it first

Ten dollars isn't a lot, especially given the amount of work that clearly went into this game.  I still can't recommend it at that price.  The sad fact is that you're unlikely to stop playing the game early on out of frustration.  If you can try it first and see if you can get past its flaws, both major and minor, then ten bucks is more than fair.  There is a demo which should get you just about where you need to be.  Download that.  Still, I'm glad I got it on sale.  I'll play it more, certainly, but the repetition, especially the literal repetition, really hampers its value.