Some casual games really reward a full play-through, and Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, really has a lot to offer. Gripping story? Check. Addictive gameplay? Yup. Deep RPG (role-playing game) elements? Lots of them! Quality sound and graphics? That too.

Infinite Interactive found a winning balance between simple core gameplay and deep long-term gameplay elements, when it first developed Puzzle Quest for handheld game devices. Now that Puzzle Quest has come to the home computer, casual gamers can finally get a shot at saving a magical realm from warlords and monsters as well.

The aforementioned core gameplay is a match-3 game where you have to take turns with with the computer-controlled opponent to match skull tokens on a grid filled with as many as 7 different token types. Whoever matches skulls will reduce their opponent’s Health, and once your Health drops to zero, you’re beaten. But the other six token types - four colors of magical Mana as well as Experience and Gold tokens - give you benefits as well, letting you gain magical powers as well as gaining more skills and other upgrades in the long-term game. Both you and your enemies can use accumulated Mana to cast spells that give special effects, like converting tokens on the board, damaging the opponent’s Health, or even giving you extra turns. The opposition can get quite tough and you’ll have to plan your moves ahead, because one wrong move could cost you the fight.

In the long-term game between puzzle screens, you have some control in how you want to progress, by clicking on locations on a map, then clicking on menu options within each location. You can take part in a variety of quests, including some optional side quests, while upgrading your character’s skills and equipment and powers.

One of the cooler elements of the game is the ability to build your own citadel with different buildings that each unlock even more activities - you can keep captured monsters in a Dungeon, train them as mounts to ride, learn spells from captured enemies, and build new weapons in a Forge. Each of these activities requires you to solve a match-3 puzzle, collecting a required number of several types of tokens, but offers lots of benefits in upgrading your abilities in combat - and upgrading your abilities is all part of the charm of an RPG.

And there’s a lot more. While you venture across the world saving the kingdom, battling dragons and Undead and other fearsome enemies, you’ll gain companions who can join you on your quest, and they might offer you new adventures as well. As you get to enemy cities, you can even conquer them and gain benefits from them.

The graphics are colorful and flavorful, but the real charm is in the sound design, which includes spoken dialog in the story screens as well as a very appropriate fantasy adventure soundtrack. You’ll want to keep going, even when you get stuck against a particularly nasty monster with tricky powers, to see the storyline through. There’s a “Lord of the Rings”-style plot with vast armies, mighty sorcery and realms of the dead, and even after you finish the storyline you can still enjoy the game by fighting other human players online! There’s really no puzzle why we’ve given such a high score to this game - click on the download button to enter the quest and see for yourself!

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(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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