If you haven't already, play the first Puzzle Quest, where you battle warlords all across the lands, build your castle and tame ferocious beasts and gain their powers.

Unless you prefer to battle hordes of rats after hordes of rats after hordes of rats in someone's damp basement, in which case this game is for you.

The gameplay is of course much more polished and varied, but with the grand atmosphere of the first replaced with you being pest control, it becomes a grind with nothing to motivate whatsoever.

Puzzle Quest 2 deviates in a good number of ways from its predecessor. Most notable are the changes to mana and that you now have a weapon. Overall I'd say it was a good change, as it doesn't feel like a recycled version of the first game at all, while still having the same basic gameplay.

With the mana changes, it's harder to become godly, but it also feels like every level gain is a really tiny improvement. Heavily investing in one stat has diminishing returns (which is fine from a balance perspecive). Enemies scale up a bit faster than you do, and once dead they stay dead, so there's a strange sort of progression going on there since you can't grind forever.

Similar to the first game, the encounter rate is through the roof. Fortunately you can skip a good number of encounters by simply ignoring the monsters. There's far less quests, but most of the quests in the first game were pretty pointless to begin with, so I guess this is can be seen as a good thing.

Fortunately the mini-games are toned down and varied, and luckily opening treasures has no failure. So it's nice to have freebies every now and then to break up the monotony.

The story, as best I can tell, bears no relation to the first game. Not that either one is special, anyhow.

If you like Puzzle Quest 1, I'd say this is a worthy addition. If match-three games aren't your thing, this game won't do anything to appease that feeling. I'll give this an 8.

After enjoying the original Puzzle Quest, I thought I'd give this a spin. It's much less fun than it's predecessor, it's very repetivite and not very rewarding. As you progress enemies take longer and longer to kill but offer no challenge whatsoever.

Avoid!

O dear god. I got this game through a humble bundle, so it wasn't a waste of money. It started off fun, basicly it's a deeper version of Bejeweled where matching colors gives you points that you can then use to activate certin skills in order to defeat your opponent. Leveling up gives you access to new skills. It was fun until about halfway through the game, where I kept thinking to myself "I've gone this far, I might as well finish it." But it just kept going. Battle after battle. Fight after fight. I rarely changed skills once I found an effective combo. Monsters rarely even posed a challenge, even towards the end, and the final boss was easily dispatched. The "combat" just got so repetitive I was praying for the game to be over. The odd thing was, once I beat the final boss, the game continued, as if I wanted the chance to go back and beat every single encounter that I may have missed. No way. I cant say this game is bad, but I can only recomend it if you REALLY like Bejeweled, and even then it's a chore. It was suffering to "beat" it. No way in hell would I suffer through trying to get all of the achievments. I didn't try online, so I cant say, but I doubt playing against a human would be much better.

Okay, imagine Puzzle Quest with new classes and abilities and equipment except there's no world map (everything is zoomed in and room-based), EVERYTHING is about 3x slower (walking speed, combat animations, unskippable messages), 80% of battles are just cannon fodder, and there's not much dialogue or plot. Also there's no main base, which means no research, mounts, sieging, or crafting.