The galaxy of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is wonderfully designed, but hacking leapgates dissuades one from being able to explore it.
Being a current resident of the DC area, we got hit with a major snowstorm this past weekend (almost 3 feet around these parts). 250,000 homes in the DC area lost power for a greater part of the weekend including my own. Being stuck at home with no power meant no electronics, very little lighting, and no heat. What do people do with no power for extended periods of time? Read? Fortunately, I had a fully charged DS ready to go, and ended up spending several hours playing Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. It’s somewhat of an old game, but with my love for Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, I’m more into puzzle-based RPG games as of late, and so I decided to put several hours into Puzzle Quest: Galactrix.
The game did not get as good reviews as the original Puzzle Quest, and I’m now coming to understand that for myself. For those wondering, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is a RPG/puzzle game set in a sci-fi universe. The puzzle game revolves around matching 3 or more hexagon blocks of the same color in order to remove them from the board. The RPG elements for the game including leveling up, battling opponents, taking on sidequests and the main quest for rewards, and mining resources in order to create, sell, or buy items and equipment.
The sci-fi aspect of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is a great fit, and I think it’s done quite well. As a fan of sci-fi games like Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire, the amount of sci-fi elements in place for this game are thoughtfully detailed. You travel around in a starship through various galaxies, able to pick up all sorts of missions that involve deliveries, investigations, and combat. Along the way, you can mine resources on asteroids, trade at colonies that have been set up, and even attack neutral ships to steal their gear. It’s a very well thought out universe, and the sci-fi aspect of the game is brilliant. In fact, I like the setting of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix more than the original Puzzle Quest.
Unfortunately, while the game’s sci-fi setting is remarkably done, the game itself seems to fall flat. The biggest negatives of the game are enough to practically sink it: the sheer number of times you have to hack leapgates and the ridiculous amount of loading & autosaving throughout the game. The game should have been retitled Puzzle Quest: Hacking Leapgates, because that’s basically what you’ll be spending most of the game doing.
So what is hacking a leapgate? Before explaining that, let me describe how traveling works in the game. In Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, there seem to be something like 30-40 different star systems in the entire galaxy. Each star-system has a couple of planets, asteroids, and a couple other random places your ship can visit. In order to get from one star-system to another, you have to hack the leapgate that connects from one star system to another. The right screenshot above is an example of the Krstallus star system, consisting of several different places you can visit like planets, a station, and an asteroid. Notice the other two items on the screenshot – the leapgates. In order to travel from Krystalli to another star system adjacent to it, you will have to hack the leapgate so you can take it to get to the next star system. Fortunately, once you’ve hacked it, you can travel between those two star systems without having to hack it again. But considering there are probably 40 or so different star systems and multiple paths from one star system, there may be over a hundred leapgates.
Hacking leapgates revolves around trying to match a certain number of combos based on color under a certain time limit. On an easy “leapgate”, you may have to match 8 combos within 60 seconds. The wrench in the mix is that the 8 combos have to be matched in the exact color order that is stipulated. So you might have to do: blue, red, blue, white, green, yellow, yellow, purple. If you match another color instead of the order, it won’t throw off your progress, but you eventually have to do all of the colors in the order in order to open the leapgate. As you play more into the game, you are basically required to do even more combos with not much more of a time increase. Having to match 24 colored combos in under 20 minutes is quite stressful, and ridiculously annoying because everything is random. Sometimes it will not ever be possible to get the 24 needed to unlock the leapgate, so you end up having to restart it multiple times in order to proceed.
Matching combos against a countdown clock is probably the weakest aspect of this game, yet it’s pretty much where you’ll spend maybe 50% or more of your time playing. This is not the game I signed up for. There are matching mini-games for harvesting resources on mines, haggling, the best one: fighting opponents. The original Puzzle Quest focused on battle opponents through puzzling, which was what made it so fun. Even the battling against opponents in Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is enjoyable, but the number of encounters are so few – it’s almost like you have to hack 5-10 leapgates in order to fight one opponent. The sheer number of missions and sidequests are also quite staggering, but with a limit of only being able to accept 4 or so at a time makes the mission management very frustrating and inefficient since you have to do so much traveling.
I actually really enjoyed the missions in this game, but who made the stupid decision to not only limit the number of missions you could carry at one time, but the fact that you had to spend most of the game hacking leapgates? If you could carry as many missions as you wanted and hacking leapgates was simply removed from the game, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix would really be a great game. Well, it would still have to deal with the issue of lengthy loading and autosaving after every leapgate, encounter, entering a different star system, etc. It’s almost like half of the game is about hacking leapgates and a quarter of the game is loading and autosaving. The best part of the game – enjoying the sci-fi galaxy, battling enemies, upgrading your ship with parts, etc. all fall into that small 25% of the game that I wish was 100% of the game. Poor Puzzle Quest: Galactrix – you had so much potential. Here’s hoping the next Puzzle Quest actually focuses on what made the original game popular to begin with.
Loading ...