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Review: Puzzlegeddon | PSNStores

Review: Puzzlegeddon

Posted by on December 29th, 2009 | 0 Comments | Tags: ,

Developer: Pieces Interactive
Release Date: December 17th, 2009
Price: $9.99
Demo: PC Version
Players: 1-6 (online)

What I liked:

  • New puzzle mechanics that mix a blend of real time strategy and puzzle shifting gameplay.
  • Interesting life/death mechanic.

What I disliked:

  • Bland music with no custom soundtrack option.
  • Lack of split screen/local multiplayer.
  • Lackluster audio cues that alert you to different situations, which in turn makes the overall feel a bit muddled.

Puzzlegeddon is a game that’s not afraid to completely change contemporary puzzle gameplay mechanics, offering real-time strategy warfare bundled in a puzzle shifting setting. It’s a mix that doesn’t quite pay off for me, though I can appreciate the effort and perhaps see how others might enjoy it.

The game doesn’t have a campaign or any kind of progression, instead opting for a free form “do it yourself” menu that lets you set up the time, rules, bots, and then off you go. I never do prefer this to a standard single player campaign— it feels too shallow and has a kind of a “is that all there is?” feel to it— but there are certainly a bevy of options to make the most of it.

Puzzlegeddon is a puzzle game of the shifting variety, where you shift blocks to form 5+ chain combos, and trigger said combos with a press of a button. The colors on the board correspond to defensive and offensive strengths, and if you clear enough of the same color you get access to attacks on other AI players, such as rockets or anti-rocket defenses. The main goal is to destroy the AI before they destroy you.

If you are destroyed, which is almost certain given the game’s difficulty even on Easy mode, the game shifts into the underworld where you must complete a challenge in order to gain an extra life. Fail that, and it’s automatically game over. The aesthetics of the underworld section and gameplay are quite good and a nice break from the standard warfare mode, and in fact has a single player mode dedicated to it (which I much rather prefer to play).

As far as multiplayer goes, there are your standard ranked and unranked games along with the leaderboards, but I could never find anyone online to play. No local play is perplexing given the game’s simple graphics and abundance of space on both sides of the screen. If there was ever a puzzle game that would work great in a split-screen mode, it would be Puzzlegeddon. It’s practically built for it. Why isn’t it here?

The game isn’t all that addicting, nor are the blend of warfare and puzzle done quite as well as it needed to be (the audio cues for earning missile defenses, for example, are hard to hear and not very pronounced). The Poison Peril mode is fun enough to get the two star rating barely over three, but I can only really recommend this to hardcore puzzle fanatics wanting something completely new.