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Affilliation
"Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords" Demo Review
“Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords” is basically a RPG (role-playing game). You pick a class, equip your character with stuff, take on quests, fight baddies, level-up, assign points to your stats, etc. Combat, however, is executed by playing a Bejeweled type puzzle.
Your level and equipment determine your HP (hit-points), and your class mainly determines what spells/techniques you can execute in combat. You stats affect how effective various aspects in combat, fire affect red pieces, water affects blue pieces, etc. In combat, you and your opponent take turns swapping adjacent pieces on the board to make Bejeweled style combinations. 
The pieces you combine determine the various aspects of combat. Damage is mainly dealt to your opponent by combining 3 or more skulls together.
The elemental pieces, in particular, provide you with “mana”, which you use for casting spells or executing techniques (like dealing damage, destroying certain pieces or shifting mana, etc). Even the amount of cash you get (and experiences points also, I think) at the end of combat are affected by the pieces you play on the board.
The structure and navigation system of the main map is similar to the Tactics type games where you basically just choose where you want to go. On the way, you may encounter some baddies which you’ll have to dispatch. As you go along and accumulate wealth, aside from purchasing items and equipment, you may also opt to improve your citadel (or house) to gain extras in the game, like mini-games (perhaps similar to the fairy world aspect of Breath of Fire III). The game also supports multiplayer, so you can pit your character and puzzling skill at other.
The demo only allows you to play until level 7, so I wasn’t able to see the game through to the end. I’m a bit annoyed that the game is currently planned to be released only for the DS and PSP (which is strange since the demo is for the PC). Given the variety of puzzles in Puzzle Pirates, I was a bit surprised that you could only play the Bejeweled like combat. But then again, they did manage to put enough twists in the Bejewled style game to make it interesting and competitive. Before this game, I couldn’t imagine how you could make Bejewled competitive, but they pulled it off nicely. Perhaps they put in some other puzzle games in the mini-games available in your citadel.
I like what I’ve seen in the demo, it makes me actually think about getting a DS just to play the game. Given that they have a demo for the PC, I think (and hope) they decide to release a PC version in the future. Regardless of where it’s available right now, this game looks very promising. If you have a DS or PSP, this is a good game to check out. For now, I’ll just keep on dreaming for a PC version.
Here are some more screen-shots:
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