Kup Puzzle Kingdoms

Nie polecam. Niby wszystko w porządku, ale w porównaniu do Puzzle Quest 1 jest niesłychanie nudna. Przez całą grę poruszanie się po mapie ogranicza się do wybrania pomiędzy dwoma lokacjami, reszta jest nieaktywna. No chyba, że chcemy ciągle wracać w miejsca, które już odwiedziliśmy (nie ma to większego sensu). Owiedzanie każdego z królestw jest boleśnie powtarzalne: za każdym razem podbijamy krainę, niszczymy kostkę zdobywamy nową jednostkę i czar. Po nastym razie najbardziej przychylnie nastawiony gracz (czyli ja) zaziewa się na śmierć. Rozwój bohatera nie jest jakoś specjalnie zauważalny. Bardzo szybko zdobywamy poziom, który daje nam zwycięstwo prawie w każdej potyczce za pierwszym podejściem. Złoto wydaje mi się zupełnie zbędne, nigdy mi go nie zabrakło - wręcz przeciwnie. I najgorsza wtopa: rodzaj układanki, którą trzeba ułożyć, aby zdobyć nowe jednostki. Po jakimś czasie dałem sobie z tym zupełnie spokój, czasami nawet 500 ruchów nie wystarczało. Może nie żałuję wydanej kasy, bo to były jakieś grosze w wyprzedaży i nie żałuję też spędzonego czasu, ale gra jest niesatysfakcjonująca. Jakie rozczarowanie po genialnym Puzzle Quest 1.

When I bought Puzzle Kingdoms, it was on a 90% Steam sale and costed me a buck and a half. Unfortunately, money isn't the biggest concern when it comes to a game's actual worth, the real valuable resource we truly pay when playing games is time.

Puzzle Kingdoms is a Bejeweled-like puzzle game with some strategy RPG elements thrown in. Now if you're not farmiliar with those match the shapes kind of games that's been flooding the web for the past several years, you're not missing much. The activity consists of endlessly and effortlessly moving shapes around in one way or another to group them together, and when you do a nice little sound effect plays and the shapes disappear to make room for new ones, manipulating your brain with constant small benefits to drive you to keep playing.
While doing a good job at cloaking itself from the fact, Puzzle Kingdoms is much like those games. The game provides you with "troops" you can buy and use which can attack and deal damage to enemy troops after you have matched the same shape enough times, and later on gives you more kinds of troops and different items which give you slight benefits. At first one may think the game has a neat twist to the formula, but soon enough one will discover that the game is just covering it's one boring mechanic- moving shapes around to group them- with much more distraction and brain manipulations than the other games of it's type, rather than adding any new interesting mechanics.
The game is insultingly easy, giving you a staggering amout of money to endlessly fill up your board with troops while the opposition never attacks you with anything bigger than what you already have. It forces you into painfully slow paced puzzles that makes you roll an invisible dice over and over again until you win, all for the sake of a story that is so obviously ment to manipulate you into giving any context to matching shapes it's laughable. The choices made in this game- the kind of troops you buy and the items you equip- have zero implication egainst an opponent that literally can't beat you as long as you deny him a specific shape to group together.

The game as a whole can pretty much last forever, and that is a pretty big part of the problem- it manipulates you to play it endlessly and effortlessly and in turn do nothing but waste your precious time. If a game does that it should at least have a strong point (Prime examples are Allan Blomquist and Kyle Gabler's "Little Inferno" or Edmund Mcmillen's "AVGM") or have some really solid mechanics to go with it so the player will have to [god forbid] think about the game.
As much the gaming industry wants to dany it, "time spent divided by money spent" is not a healthy way to measure a game's value, because that implies your time is a bad thing you want to throw as much of it away as possible. This game is just not worth your time even if it costed you zero dollars.
Please, do something and play something meaningful and fulfilling with that time, because your time is limited and it is worth much more than this.

NOTE: I paid 90p for this game during a 90% sale a few years back, and my review is based on a price around that region. £10.99 is too steep, but 75% off or above is reasonable.

Puzzle Kingdoms takes a familiar match-three base and adds a little spin on it to make it feel fresh. Basic gameplay involves pushing tiles onto a grid of blocks, making the rest of the row or coloumn move along by one tile and hopefully making a line of 3. The spin comes from the player-built armies you take into each match.

From swordsmen up to dragons, you can take up to four units into a battle with you, and your opponent does the same. Each unit is “fuelled” by a different colour of tile on the game grid. Clearing a line of three adds one point of fuel to your unit, and combos add more. Once your unit is fully powered up you can unleash their attack on your opponent or wait for other units to be ready to attack which grants additional damage.

The added layer of strategy in building an efficient army changes Puzzle Kingdoms from a well made match-three into something much more interesting. You may have a powerful Green unit, but stacking your army full of only those not only means the other colours go to waste when you match them, but also you need to clear a lot of Green tiles to get any combo bonuses. You also need to pay attention to what colours your opponent is going for so you can try to get those lines yourself and prevent them attacking.

The story is kinda dull. There's a pretty interesting twist in the tail, but little reason to really care about it- so you should grab this for the Puzzle more than the Kingdoms. It's well worth sinking some time into if you can get it cheap.

Pick up the great Puzzle Quest or even the mediocre Puzzle Quest 2, rather than this. The puzzle system is very boring and dull, based on luck and the AI has lots of "luck". Not recommended.
3/10

A fun matching puzzle game with a twist of RPG thrown in. It actually turned out pretty well and you can unlock a variety of heroes, battle units, and relics to support you in your quest as you fight your way through the different kingdoms. Your heroes level up through battles to learn new spells to support you. If you ever wondered what a matching game like Bejeweled would be like with fantasy elements and more of a story/goal to it then here it is.

What an addictive game! I wasn't expecting much, to be honest, but I installed it, played a bit, and here we are, 25 hours later. Yes, 25 hours for a single playthrough. Okay, yeah, I started over a few times early on, but once I got the hang of it I just kept going. The primary gameplay is match 3, with a slider rather than a swap mechanism. Each kingdom you conquer opens up a tavern and a ruin where you can find new relics, spells and items, and recruit new troops. To do this, you use some of the gold you've gotten in your warmongering, and then play a minigame. Higher level items and troops have a higher gold cost and a tougher minigame to play.

You can customize your newly acquired kingdoms with your chosen hero(s), troops, and relics, and use them in battles against kingdoms that you haven't conquered yet. You can outfit your hero with the items and spells you've gotten. All of these items have a color value and a points value, and each kingdom has either discounts or increased costs for using these items. (Ie, a kingdom might have lower point cost for blue and red items and troops, and higher point cost for red and yellow items and troops. Your hero's total cost is affected by his color and the combination of items and spells he or she has assigned.)

It's relaxing, but it can also be challenging, especially if you have trouble with the recruitment minigames.

Very interesting game. Requires thinking and concentration. So much of rpg through simply brained design. Pure 9 of 10 for puzzle.

Puzzles. Kingdoms. Heroes. Battles. Pure Win.


I've never been a fan of puzzle games, so when I saw this one's premise I thought that maybe this was a puzzle game for me: think of Bejeweled meets Heroes of Might and Magic and you'll be close of what this is.

You're a hero, and have hero stuff to do. In order to kick some ♥♥♥, you'll need to build an army. To do it, you'll engage on mighty battle against various villains, taking turns on a bewejeled-like game made to simulate battle... And works like a charm! I know how it sounds, I have to experience it to believe it.

Engaging gameplay, good art and a delicious twist to two well-known game mechanics make this one an instant thumbs up. I have a really long pending game list to go through, but I’ll play this one again for sure. If all this picked your interest, grab a couple of bucks and buy it, you'll get nice value for your money.

I bought this game on the premise "from makers of puzzle quest".
But it is worse that pq galactrix. In puzzle quest you play to match 3.
Here you must play so that your opponent dont match it. And even so it is completly
random because of the tiles that comes from the borders.

I'd probably play the crap out of this on my phone or something but it's pretty basic and gets old fast. Puzzle Quest and Puzzle Quest 2 are way better, since they've touted this game as being "from the creators of Puzzle Quest." I guess if you're looking for a fairly mindless game to blow time on it's okay but wait for a super cheap deal.

simultaneously soothing and infuriating. basically a flash puzzle game but with many many hours more content

Puzzle Kingdoms is a game that tries to fool you into thinking it can do more than you think. Reading about about it or looking at screenshots might make you think it's a game of conquest, of gathering artifacts, of strategy and magic. I am here to tell you, don't be fooled.

Puzzle Kingdoms is a fairly poor Bejeweled clone with a metagame tacked on. You do "conquer" new lands but it's really just series of Bejeweled games. You do find new items and artifacts but it requires you to play through series of Bejeweled games. You do cast spells to improve your Bejeweled games and there is strategy involved but what it all comes down to, is just grind.

The problem, besides the fact that the version of Bejeweled they chose to use for this game is horrific, is that your first 20 minutes of play and your last 20 minutes of play are exactly the same. There is no sense of challenge or adventure, you just grind through game after game and eventually you're done. It's mindnumbingly boring and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

This game came in a bundle I bought off Bundle Stars. After playing with other more promising games I decided to give this one a shot. I became instantly hooked and spent 30 hours on this little addictive gem. It's kind of like Candy Crush but much manlier, with characters like goblins and minotaurs and whatnot!
You have to rely on your sense of strategy and forethought, but also on luck since there's pretty random poisonous blocks out there.
I'd think 13,99€ is a bit pricey, so pick it up when on sale or if you stumble upon it in a bundle.

Too much randomness, too little skill, and frequent stalemates where the best move is to deny your opponent play. Boring except when it's frustrating. Get the original Puzzle Quest, or Gyromancer, but not this.

I've played Puzzle Quest on various devices and loved it. This is not Puzzle Quest, it seems, despite being made by the developers. The RPG and tactical elements are a nice touch, but the puzzle dynamics are not. I was hoping for the layout of Puzzle Quest, but the puzzle layout for PK is one where the sides show you the puzzle pieces that you normally wouldn't see and the way Puzzle Quest pieces would link, change, explodes, etc. is not in PK at all. The puzzle dynamics are boring in PK. The only saving grace are the RPG and tactics, which are stifled by the puzzle dynamics.

I want to like this game, but it seems unbalanced and unfinished. The story is forgettable but that's no big deal. The battles are far too easy for the most part. I find the time-based puzzles (to unlock troops) frustrating. There are elements in the game (some of the kingdom stuff) that don't really do anything leading me to wonder if it was released undone. I'm a completionist so I'll probably try to finish it but I find the altar puzzles (which need to be completed to unlock the next kingdom) kinda boring so who knows.

I got it for a couple of bucks on sale. It was worth it I suppose for the time I've spent on it but the initial enjoyment gave way to disappointment so I can't really recommend it.

Very nice and quite addictive game. Match 3 with a story and little strategy elements. Player can choose between two heroes (female or male, each has only one avatar, so player can't change the look of his hero). Story is basically about good fighting against evil (don't want to spoil it). As the player explores the world, the're are relics and troops, that can help to fight.

What I don't like about the game is that it crashes occasionally. Disabling Steam Community alerts helps a lot, but I'm suggesting saving the game from time to time to avoid sudden freeze and necessity of repeating some fights.
Speaking of saving. That's another minus of the game. Game has only "Save an Quit" (to the main menu) option, so if player wants to play after saving, it's necessary to pass through the main menu over and over again (quite frustrating over the time).

Anyway. I recommend the game to everyone, who like casual Match 3 games with mini-games and challenges.

great game mix of puzzle and rpg

This game is an interesting puzzle RPG. I've never played the other Puzzle Quest games, so I can't really compare it to the others, but in general, the gameplay is pretty simple. Match colors so your troops can attack, and kill all enemies. As you play, you get items that do different things and different spells that you charge up by making matches. Most of the interesting strategy is choosing which units and items to use, making the actual puzzle as easy as possible. The gameplay is decently fun, but the plot is horrendous. All in all, it's a good little time-waster... I managed to somehow log 30 hours on this game, even though I really only played a little bit at a time.

Not worth it for $15. I got this for $1 during a sale, and it was a huge deal at that price. I'd probably pay up to $5 for this game.

Wow--this game is good. I was expecting another typical ho-hum gem matching game, but somehow they actually made it fun. It feels like a turn-based strategy game, but uses gem matching elements as the means of attacking. It actually works very well.