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There’s a lot more puzzle games on the market these days than there are original puzzle game concepts. This is an oblique way of saying that a lot of these games are pretty bald-faced imitations. Tetris is probably the most widely-cloned of all, but it happens to almost any good, original puzzler. There were Lumines clones on the PC shareware scene barely weeks after the real thing hit the market.

Whoever made Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords won’t convince anyone that they came up with the basic, core concept on their own. You would have to be blind and a hundred yards off not to recognize Bejeweled at the heart of this game.

That said, this is probably the deepest, longest, and most detailed Bejeweled imitation anyone will bother to make. Wrapped around that not-quite-original center, there’s a ton of additional complexity and content. So long as you’re not the crusading moral outrage type, Puzzle Quest could eat up a lot of otherwise empty hours.

Final Fantasy Bejeweled

The big idea here was to give the game a fantasy RPG makeover. If something like Ogre Battle or Final Fantasy Tactics used Bejeweling to resolve its encounters instead of skirmish-scale turn-based combat, the result would look more or less like this. Towns, dungeons, shops, encounters, and all the rest are scattered around an overhead map, which you wander from turn to turn.

You begin the game by picking one of four character classes, each of which is adept at using different kinds of spells and skills. Those abilities are powered by four kinds of mana, which you acquire by wiping out the right color of gems on the game board.

Here’s a brief digression, for the two of you who have never played Bejeweled. It’s a square grid, filled with gems of different colors. In each turn, you can make two adjacent gems trade places. The goal is to match three like gems in a row – those disappear, and more gems settle down from the top of the grid to keep every space full. As you might guess, the real trick is making chain combos to wipe out as many gems as you can get in one shot.

In addition to the colored gems, Puzzle Quest adds three more space fillers. Gold pieces and experience points are self-explanatory – matching those gives you bonus cash and experience. Matching up skulls, meanwhile, deals damage to your enemy.

Embattled

Combat in Puzzle Quest is a head-to-head affair. You and your opponent take turns making moves on a single grid, trying to out-combo each other in search of more mana and those vital skull matchups.

Match three jewels of any color and you get three points of that color mana. With enough mana points of the appropriate colors, you can spend a turn casting a spell like Stun, which deals a little damage to the enemy directly and forces him to miss a turn. Other spells might blow up a lot of gems at once, let you eat all the gems of a particular type, or otherwise shake up the game board in some favorable way.

Even without spending mana on spells, there are other ways to get an edge with careful combinations. Four of a kind nets a free turn, for instance, while five of a kind throws out a bonus “wildcard” jewel to use.

Then there’s the effect of the game’s RPG components. Building up your character’s stats and equipping him with items (or training a monster to ride into battle, or hiring an ally to back you up) gives bonuses to damage, mana acquisition, and other crucial variables. A super-tough character gets lots of extra mana, deals lots of extra damage, and has a high chance of scoring extra turns and other bonus benefits.

Between the character customization and the variety of opponents, there’s a heck of a lot of depth to the quest mode (to say nothing of versus games between two experienced players). Sometimes a game can hinge on one very lucky fall of the gems, but in the end the odds favor the more observant and careful player. There’s a handy turn time limit option to affect the speed of the game, too, so you can leave it unlimited for slow, methodical progress or shorten it up to create a sort of “speed chess” effect.

The Holy Grail

Add it all up and there’s a thick wad of game here. The fantasy story and graphics aren’t anything especially distinctive, but they do the job of gluing all the different gameplay elements together.

As for the tricky question of whose idea is what…well, it depends on your perspective. The average gamer might not care too much. A Popcap Games employee might care a little more. Bejeweled owes its own debt to Tetris Attack, so in any case it’s a little more complicated than A bites a line from B. If you don’t have a personal stake in the matter, it’s probably best not to let it bring you down too much. It’s a fun game, wherever the credit is due.

Article by: D.F. Smith
Video produced by: Matt Keil