Puzzle Quest: Galactrix

Earning experience points makes everything better. Few things feel as sweet as leveling up, and getting to assign skill points afterward makes it even tastier. Forget obvious examples like the addictiveness of World of Warcraft, have you seen Chore Wars? Groups of people put their household chores online as quests, and roommates will vacuum, do the dishes, and worse to receive the high buttery feeling of accomplishment that accompanies watching numbers representing your own value go up. Chore Wars proves it: XP renders even the most tedious tasks rewarding.

Now imagine a Chore Wars-like XP shell you could put around whatever experiences you’d like to take up a notch, anything from Tetris to brushing your teeth. This is the service Puzzle Quest begins to envision. Remember that game Bejeweled? Maybe you don’t have to remember it, maybe you still play. Puzzle Quest is Bejeweled as an RPG battle, you and the computer trade turns on the same board, with gem combinations dealing damage to opponent’s hit points or charging energy pools drawn from by special skills.

It’s awesome.

True to its name, it’s a game full of quests. I should explain: the first Puzzle Quest game came out a few years ago with a swords and magic fantasy setting; this new game is set in space, following in the proud tradition of games like Trade Wars and one of the greatest ever, Wing Commander: Privateer. Galactrix promises everything, commanding a fleet of customizable ships, trading cargo between ports, mining asteroids, crafting weapons, gathering a crew of personalities, playing a universe of factions off one another. In practice a lot of this falls short of the dream, but it’s a sweet, sweet dream.

It should be said, this is a simple game. It feels like it was made by a small company; the game is just Bejeweled, some maps, some menus and some art. The art is solid and the whole game comes off as a class production, but don’t expect anything so flashy as animated cut scenes.

The puzzle board in Galactrix is now hexagonal, with new gems arriving from the direction of the previous move. This adds a bit of strategy, and more than a bit of room for dumb luck chain reactions to take place. The dumb luck is fine, but when all intricate planning is blown up by countless points of mine damage showering in from off screen, some players will go insane.

The main game plot is maintained by solid writing and a creepy vibe. The year is in the 5-digits, and a humanity governed by mega-corporations is all over space. Your company, defined by its members’ command of psychic abilities, tried playing God and got burned by creating hyper-intelligent and murderous space psychic organic machines without souls. Still-shot cut scenes star the leader of these Soulless, a two-faced angel/demon roboman, sermonizing about the next in evolution and the eradication of the weak. Along with a soundtrack of weird alien noise reminiscent of the background music in the final stage of the original Metroid, these scenes are nice and unsettling.

Each activity in the game is a Bejeweled variant puzzle. For mining you match resource tiles until you run out. In crafting you match resources together and then combine those matches, all with the feeling of assembling an item. (There’s a small game flaw in that for the most resource demanding items, crafting can be practically impossible.) There’s a puzzle to learn rumors from the populations of different worlds, but really this is historical information about the game universe where you learn what’s been going on since 2000 AD. Above a lot else these rumors give this game flavor, with history book narrative often being juicier than the dialogue of other quests, and it’s too bad this writing is so much less accessible. In my favorite puzzle, you haggle at shops by eliminating gems from a set hex board. The more you eliminate, the more percent off you can make purchases for. This is critical to acquiring ships and items if you don’t do a lot of mining to become rich. It’s also catnip for the obsessive, because getting the gems to zero requires autism.

Like with the first game, it’s possible to dominate so hard that the battle gameplay gets ridiculous. Get one time distorting device that gives you extra turns and you’re likely to win, get two and your opponent never gets a chance. The game includes a multiplayer option, but weapon imbalances like the time machines make player battles pointless games of nuclear first strike.

After finishing the game, I can think only of the disappointments. The customizable ships aren’t so interesting: the choices are between good and terrible ships, not between strategies. One of the main puzzles you do, hacking a leapgate to access other sectors of space, gets so repetitive you don’t mind flying through any number systems to avoid doing it. Mining and crafting aren’t really worth the trouble; you can simply buy even the best weapons and ships. The factions to be sided with don’t amount to making any quest unavailable, so there’s no system of ethical decision making or a defining of just what sort of space citizen you are, you simply do everyone’s work whether it’s dirty or otherwise. Your crew members don’t often feel like a real interacting team, and you don’t get a choice in them. The leveling up is capped at level 50, heartbreakingly.

As for the game universe, I never really believed it. It’s obvious the worlds of the game only exist for your needs, you feel like you’re the only ship moving around doing anything. This is fine if all you want is gameplay, but the atmosphere and sense of immersion are lacking. It’s very possible to trigger plot events in orders that break continuity, with characters asking questions about things they well know. The quests become a blur, with few yielding much emotional payoff or sense of adventuring. In one series of quests you pursue rogue psychics who have taken their studies beyond the limits of what ultra-future space society is comfortable with. There’s a sense you may learn great powers and cosmic truths from them; instead each teaches you to better avoid random encounters and then promptly dies. In another series you try to rescue your shipmate’s friend from prison, doing quest after quest for the prison warden, only to learn the rescue is impossible. In the end you kill the jerk, but the resolution feels so hollow. The game makers create quests requiring such amounts of work that you naturally crave equal sized rewards, and then they fail to deliver.

There’s such a feeling that it could have been so much more.

But while actually playing, I couldn’t put the game away. It’s hypnotically addictive fun, even if later you’re not sure if it deserved to have been so.