“Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords” is a great puzzle game with a fantastic background story. However, at the end, is a puzzle game mixed with a roles game. When you enter the game, you’re received by Eveline the Wise, who is supposed to guide you during your journey through the Realms of Etheria, the scenario of this game. The idea beneath the game is that Eveline the Wise will have many questions for you, and you’ll have to answer them all by solving different puzzle games. You’ll be going on many quests and doing stuff.
The interface and sound of this game are unbelievable. Too much, you could say, for a puzzle game. Everything is carefully designed and appropriate for the context of the story that the game tells. The characters from which you can choose the one you want to represent, seem to have gone out from a Japanese cartoon. When creating your character you can choose among several professions as follow:
• Druids: are well schooled in the magic of nature with spells based on Yellow and Green Mana. They defeat their foes in a subtle manner, often doing such things as entangling them or changing the gems on the board.
• Knights: are nobles and chivalrous warriors who excel in using the Stars on the board to great effect, such as gaining extra XP or healing themselves. They also have a good stock of damage spells based on Red and Green Mana.
• Warriors: are fierce and efficient fighters whose special attacks mostly deal direct damage to their foes. Although many of these special spells are based on Red Mana, they have a wide variety of them to use in different situations.
• Wizards: keep a good mix of different spells, based largely on Red and Yellow Mana. They just can as easily cast spells of damage as Fireball, as they can spell powerful defensive spells like Wall of Fire.
When you first enter the game, you’ll see the welcome screen with the following options on it:
- Single Player: after you create one or more players, they’ll be saved. When you enter into this submenu, you’ll be asked for a name as a new player. It’s possible to have a list of different players and record their performance. This way, you can play home tournaments with family and friends.
- New Quest: this option leads you to the first level of the game and you’ll be previously seeing a brief introduction to the game.
- Continue Quest: in case you want to continue an unfinished game.
- Settings: this is the menu from which you can set some game options like, sound volume, music volume, input mode, full screen, screen resolution and display tutorials.
- High Scores and Quit: no further explanation required.
When you’re playing the game, you can pause the game clicking on the Esc button of your keyboard. You’ll be seeing a pop-up dialog window with the following options:
• Resume: to come back to the game.
• Settings: to see the settings dialog commented before.
• Exit: to quit the game and go back to the main menu.
You can try this game for 60 minutes before you buy the licensed version. If you like it, you can buy this game for only 19.95 dollars, right from the Oberon Media Game Center, on the Web.
About the system requirements, is not that big computer that you need to run this game. Take a look to the list:
• Windows® 2000/XP/Vista
• Pentium® III 1 GHz or faster
• 256 MB RAM
• 64 MB video card (GeForce 2 / ATI 7000 / Intel GMA 900)
• DirectX® 9.0c compatible sound card
• DirectX® 9.0c
• 105 MB Hard Drive Space
• Keyboard
• Mouse
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