I have the original Puzzle Quest, but I'll admit I'm not great at it. I've never gotten that far in it, and all attempts to do so end up with me getting bored or fed up. I tried the later Puzzle Kingdoms, and I think I spent about two minutes on it before giving up and closing it. Later I heard Puzzle Quest 2 was on the way, and I was quite excited about it. And today I finally got it. I've put about an hour or so into it, and these are my thoughts so far.
The basic puzzle mechanics are the same; chain up three or more of the gems (4 giving you an extra turn, 5 spawning a wildcard and an extra turn) and use your abilities (Used by spending a certain amount of gems you've collected) to reduce the opponent's life force to zero. Basically, it's a cross between a fairly "lite" RPG and Bejeweled. What's different in this one is the addition of a "fist" gem (Which I believe increases weapon skill, could be wrong) and the ability to use said weapons. They function just like an attack, and (where I am currently) do comparable damage.
I wasn't impressed with the characters you can have, though. There's four classes (Assassin, Barbarian, Sorcerer, Templar) and two genders, but only one portrait per class, which is a shame as Puzzle Quest had about 2-3 per gender per class, perhaps more. The avatar you have in-game also feels slightly odd. I chose the Barbarian and her model (Whilst when you saw it from the front) looked female, it seemed as if they'd just reskinned the masculine counterpart.
It's arguably more enjoyable than Puzzle Quest. It seems to have capitalised more on its RPG features and instead of going from a vague location to a vague location (i.e. castle to tower), you go across various grids. I believe the first town is about a 3x3 square, and (at the point I'm at) it turns into a dungeon crawler with the same number of grids. The enemies are static, but it's often not possible to proceed without defeating at least one. The ones that tend to be optional seem to be located near chests which contain resources (to upgrade your weapons/gear) so it's often worth your time to clear them.
It just seems to be puzzle after puzzle after puzzle. I killed a horde of rats, then went to the next room and killed a Goblin, then I had to do the chest puzzle (to get some loot) followed by the door puzzle to bash it down. All puzzles rotate around the same theme - matching gems. It would have been nice if they'd added some variety to the puzzles instead of just them all being basically the same.
Going back to the combat, two things annoyed me about it. Firstly, it seems unbalanced at times. I killed a few goblins with no issue, killed the troll, went into the only available area and it took 4-5 goes to kill some rats. The difficulty randomly spiked for no reason, and it went back to "normal" after that fight. Secondly, weapon attacks cut away from the screen and display a "splash screen" (Can't think of a better term) which states what attack it was, how much damage it did, and a nice big image to get across what it was. That annoyed me a little as it felt unnecessary and it breaks the flow of combat, and surely a less distracting (but still unique) way to show weapon damage would have been possible?
Well, all I can do is carry on. So far I'm not annoyed I spent £8 on this.
