![]() ![]() If you fancy something more bite-sized and frenetic, EightyEightGames’ 2015 sequel to its mobile hit 10,000,000 is the tile-matching dungeon crawl stripped down to its barest essentials (with a little bit of endless runner thrown in). You Must Build a Boat Image: EightyEightGames Note: some PC players have said that the game doesn’t work well on Windows 10/11. Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is available on PC ( Steam, free demo available) and Xbox (backwards compatible Xbox 360 version). It’s a shame publisher Ubisoft is unlikely to give this the full reissue treatment, as it’s a stone-cold classic. The simple concept of stacking and combining color-coded units is extrapolated through a beautifully balanced net of rules across five factions and a substantial, 30-hour campaign. ![]() It might be more accurate to call it a puzzle tactics or puzzle strategy game, as its battle system can easily rival the likes of Advance Wars for sophistication. Here are five of the best puzzle RPGs that you can play today.įor my money, Capybara’s Clash of Heroes - which first appeared on Nintendo DS in 2009, and then in a definitive “HD” version for PC and consoles in 2011 - is the greatest puzzle RPG ever made. But this subgenre has gone to much more interesting places in the last 15 years. If you crave a shot of simple match-three puzzles with a chaser of big numbers flashing up the screen, then I would recommend the more immediately satisfying Puzzle & Dragons instead, which has a decent enough new Nintendo Switch edition. But if the puzzling is boring - and it is in Puzzle Quest 3 - the rest of the game will be too. In a good puzzle RPG, the puzzle gameplay is where the action is the RPG is a superstructure that invests the puzzles with meaning and with stakes, and gives shape to your experience. The sense you get playing Puzzle Quest 3 is that the designers are more interested in the role-playing than the puzzles (and more interested in the monetisation than either). It doesn’t help that it’s a free-to-play game, with the attendant confusion of currencies and resources to regard with suspicion as you attempt to track them, wondering when the other shoe will drop. But the core match-three action is unvarnished and basic, the pace of its interaction with the combat systems (you match gems to charge up spells of the same color) feels sluggish, the story is bland, and the many layers of RPG tinkering outside of combat weigh it all down. It’s a polished game, with smoothly animated 3D characters unleashing flashy attacks on either side of the game board. Puzzle Quest 3, which is available on Steam, iOS, and Android, can’t find the magic in that same simple connection of gems and stats anymore. But, I’m sad to report, in the intervening 15 years, Puzzle Quest has lost its way. Puzzle Quest arrived just too early to make hay on smartphones, where GungHo’s similarly themed, free-to-play Puzzle & Dragons cleaned up a few years later - but even that game is no longer available on the iOS App Store.Īll of which made the recent release of Puzzle Quest 3 a curiosity - not to mention a beacon of hope for people, like me, who like matching colors and watching numbers get bigger. There remained an alchemical brilliance to Fawkner’s discovery, but the subgenre fell out of fashion, as subgenres often do. ![]() ![]() It just worked.Ī flood - alright, maybe a stream – of copycats followed, and then slowed to a trickle, before drying up completely. This genre mash-up from Australian studio Infinite Interactive, designed by Steve Fawkner, was all the more inspired for its incongruous, salted-caramel clash of two flavors: gaming at its most casual, abstract, and bite-sized, melded with a long-form storytelling genre known for depth and intricacy. Its creators had a simple idea and executed it well: use a Bejeweled-style match-three puzzle game as the gameplay engine for a role-playing adventure, in which you combat enemies, level up, and follow a story. The original Puzzle Quest, from 2007, is one of those games whose genius is all right there in the title. ![]()
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