There are some casual game types where you get a new lookalike product almost every day, until it becomes hard to distinguish between them. Not so with Puzzle Hero, one of a rather small category of hybrid puzzle-RPGs (role-playing games), in the tradition of Puzzle Quest. This sword-and-sorcery fairytale adventure adds 3D animated characters to the mix, along with a simple match-3 fighting system that’s quite easy to learn and master.

Just like in the classic myths of heroes, you have to fight a lot of monsters as you travel through the game to save your brother. In each level, you fight a cutely animated enemy - a monster vegetable, an angry little rhino, a spooky ghost, or so forth - and you have to match tokens in order to win the fight. The most important token is the sword - get three in a row of these and your little hero will run across the top of the screen and hit the monster, reducing its health. Since you and the monster take turns to match tokens, you can get hit too, and it’s a question of whose health will run out first. And there’s no time limit in matching tokens, so it’s all about the strategy rather than the quick thinking. Different tokens mean different things - some give you more gold and experience, which you can use to upgrade your equipment and fighting statistics as you go along, while others give you power-ups like increased health, double damage or a magical shield.

The game’s system of managing your statistics between fights by shopping for new swords, shields and pieces of armor is quite simple, although later on you get the twist of having magical powers that you charge up by matching a seventh token type to gain mana points. The 3D graphics for the various hairstyles, outfits, accessories, weapons and armor are reflected on your character on the screen, and as you travel along from one fight to another the landscape changes from fairytale farms to deserts to foreboding castles. There’s even an Arena mode where you can fight any opponent you’ve already beaten in the game.

But in the end, it’s just one match-3 fight after another, with no real difference in your opponent’s abilities other than higher health, attack and defense statistics, which just translates into longer fights. None of the monsters have any variety in their attacks, and the computer never gets any smarter in its strategy of picking tokens to match. The music gets kind of repetitive after a while, and unlike the 3D artwork, the simple sketches in the story screens are rather disappointing.

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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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