I'm telling you right now: this review is not going to be pretty. When I look back on games that I was hyped about but ultimately floundered fantastically, this will be my benchmark game. If the videogame industry needs its own "jumped the shark" type phrase to pronounce epic failure, it will be "pulling a Galactrix." It feels like waking up as a young kid on Christmas, only for Santa to walk up to me and slap me in the face.

Personally, I was a huge fan of the original Puzzle Quest. I loved the mish-mash of casual gem matching play mixed with a rewarding RPG story. If I ever needed a game to keep me busy on a trip, while I waited, or just wanted a good game to play – Puzzle Quest was always my go-to game. I was stunned that a game mixing such an unlikely premise could turn out so wonderful and dominate the slot on my DS. My little side story here is an important one, because you must know the love I have for this franchise, and my subsequent disgust at the way my love has treated me…and all fans for that matter.

The main mode of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is the game's story mode, which has you taking on the role of a young pilot. You'll learn the ropes of how the game plays and the various gameplay mechanics, but then you're sent away from military training, are off on your first mission, and eventually find your way on a chase across the galaxy to stop an evil menace. Can you save the galaxy? Will you even care?

The Standard Board

Gameplay chiefly concerns itself with the game board, which is where all the offensive, defensive, and battling happens. The grid is more hexagonal based than the original square system of the first game. The puzzle pieces are hexagonal too, which play heavily into the new mechanics. The premise is pretty much the same as the last time, as you connect colored gems to build up special moves, which are devices this time around instead of spells. You can use these devices to hurt your opponent, hinder them, or heal yourself. Besides using devices, you'll also be able to do direct damage to your foe by connecting at least three mines together (acting similar to the skulls in the first game). Do enough damage and you win, get experience, and maybe some money or goods.

In theory I love the new board. If – the big word here being "if" – it wasn't so flipping unfair, it would be a lot of fun. Fans of the first game should know how very unfair the game was and how the AI cheated. If you made a move that even had the possibility of a gem coming down to make a match for the computer, it would nine times out of ten times happen. When it came to the first game, however, you at least knew they could only fall from the top, so you could somewhat work around that problem. Since the new game's board is hexagonal and allows gems to come from every angle, you're looking at the computer screwing you over so many times. It happens like clockwork: you make a move, gems fall, and they always land so the AI gets a free shot. Also, when it comes to cascading combos, where gems will match, slide into play, match again, and keep doing the process – the AI is a pro. I managed to get a few, but the problem is I'm human…the game doesn't want you to get those. So the main challenge of the game ends up being trying to beat poor programming more than an intelligent AI.

Another problem is that the battles take forever. The first game's fights weren't that short either depending on the luck of the draw, but here the battles just go on and on. The main reason battles take so long is because both you and the enemy have shields, which must be wiped out before you can do actual damage to the ship; the shields can be easily replenished by using a device or making a match of a certain color. So you spend a long time fiercely battling the enemy, trading blows and working on raising the power of your shields, but then it happens – a combo by the AI. Suddenly, the game that was verging on plus twenty-minutes, is ended in a second because of cheap programming.

Also, the computer likes performing the same move combos over and over. With such quick reload times between moves, it seemed like every round the computer was using a device to increase its shields and then following it up with a laser strike.

Another problem with battling enemies is that the difficulty ramps up quickly and with little in the way of warning. You're battling enemies your own level, you take a trip, and the next thing you know your level four character is going against a level twenty. You'll then have to spend several hours grinding for experience, trying to get a new ship, some new devices, and only then will you finally be able to fight them. I don't mind level grinding as I've certainly played enough RPGs, but the levels required are usually just a couple in those games – not the nearly fifteen as with Puzzle Quest. I want to experience the story, but that's impossible to do when you partake in a bunch of meaningless side-missions and battles to even get back to there. By the time you get to experience the story again you'll forget what the hell was happening and what you were doing in the first place.

Much like the first game, almost everything you do is tied into the match-three gameplay mechanic. If you want to mine asteroids for goods you can use to craft items or sell for money, you need to make matches. If you want to try and reduce the price of goods then you can haggle, but you'll need to do matches. I don't mind the other matching systems too much, as they are against only yourself; if you make a wrong move, most of the time it's your own fault.

An exception to the rule is the hacking minigame, which you will be doing constantly. The game is split into many systems, which are all connected by warp gates. If you want to get somewhere, however, you'll have to unlock that gate to be able to go there. Fair enough, but when there are so many of them (and they randomly close and make you open them again for no reason) it feels like you're fighting time more than enemies. The hacking portion is hard, but more because of gameplay faults rather than design. To open a gate you'll need to make the colored matches the game tells you, and you only have a limited amount of time. Some gems drop that will increase your time, but they don't come often, so if you make a match and you don't have the next one in easy reach, chances are you'll be done.

The main reason the warp gates are so poorly done is because the combo system, which is a reward in the other modes, but is a punishment here. More often than not when playing the game, you'll want combos, but you'll despise them while attempting warp gates. Imagine running out of time, needing to make a few matches still, but then you get caught in a very large combo that doesn't want to end. You might make the matches you need during it, but most of the time you're making matches that aren't helping you. While this combo is constantly happening, so too is the clock, which keeps counting down second by second, though you have no way to manually control the game. Congrats – you've got to replay the gate again because you ran out of time for doing well.

A Few Devices

Of course, even if you want to try and contend with the AI, you'll have to first battle with the greatest enemy of them all: the game's touch controls!

Seriously, did nobody freaking test the game? The game features the buggiest controls I've ever witnessed. If you want to accept a mission or interact with an object, you've got to tap on it to open up a menu, then tap the item from the menu to go to it. The game doesn't want to register every touch, however, so tapping the menu item often results with your ship rocketing to a far corner of the screen. What…the…hell? Time after time I clicked on a menu item to go interact with something, only to find my ship zooming off, and then me quickly having to tap again to make it do a slow circle back, only for the same crap to happen again and again. It's so annoying and frustrating, but more than anything it breaks the game. The poor control affects gameplay too, but thankfully a little less than it does the navigating portion. Still, don't be surprised when you try for one gem swap and another gem is registered instead.

Graphically the game is pretty sparse, as it's a lot of flat, dull images on black space. Space isn't just the doom and gloom of darkness – there are anomalies, planets, meteors, black holes, nebulas, and other entities that could've drastically spiced up the game in the graphics department. The characters are uninspired too, as there just isn't a lot of detail given to them, or even the ships. The game has a somewhat ominous soundtrack, but it's basically nonexistent. If I wanted to hear the game in a room with even a little bit of noise going-on, it was all but impossible to hear the music. The only time I could actively hear the music was when I had some headphones plugged in.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is one of the worst games I've played as of recent. It's not the fact that the game was hyped up and failed to reach its lofty goals – it's just a crappy game. Cheap AI, an uneven difficulty ramp, shoddy controls, poor graphics, and barely audible music – it does nothing well or even remotely average. It's an epic failure on the grandest scale.

Score