Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords was one of those games that came out of nowhere and was the talk of the town. Developed here in Australia, Challenge of the Warlords merged your basic match-three puzzle game with a much greater purpose – that of an RPG. After a billion different ports across every major system, Infinite Interactive has moved on to the next game in the series; Puzzle Quest: Galactrix.

Galactrix moves the Puzzle Quest action from medieval times into a fairly typical sci-fi universe, where man is now a space-faring race, and presumably has been for some time. In the introductory sequence, the narrator goes on about how great the race of men is and how evil we are, but iterates that he is much worse. You play a pilot fresh out of the academy that gets to spend a few hours chasing pirates before getting tangled up in the world of the amoral mega-corporations that now control mankind’s destiny. A lot of effort has gone into the dialogue and creating a cast of reasonably likable companions, but it’s all a bit rudimentary.


The puzzle game at the core of Galactrix remains a match-three affair, but it has built on top of its thinly veiled Bejewelled-clone base by taking on a few characteristics of Alexei Pajitnov’s other puzzle game, Hexic. So rather than being restricted to vertical or horizontal matches, players can now match colours diagonally as well. As before, the various coloured gems add to your power, skills and items; for example: white gem matches grant experience points, blue gem sets repair your shields, and mine sets will do damage to your opponent (the amount of damage is determined by the sum of the numbers on the face of the three mines).

Infinite Interactive attempts to integrate the lack of gravity into the game by allowing pieces to slide in from based on your last movement, rather than from the top of the puzzle grid. It increases the number of possibilities when new gems hit the board, but it also raises the complexity a great deal. Players have little real ability to anticipate their next move and create chains – it seems like luck is the real determining factor in winning a battle, rather than skill. The number of colours on the board has been raised, and it can take quite a bit longer to work out what everything does. Galactrix certainly seems a lot less accessible at the start of the game when compared to Challenge of the Warlords.

Off the puzzle grid, most of the rest of the game just seems like Challenge of the Warlords adapted to a space setting. Character classes are replaced by different ships – up to three can be in your fleet at any time – with each different sort having some distinct advantage like greater speed or storage capacity. The magic system is replaced with an equipment system, but works in exactly the same way, giving players various offensive and defensive capabilities in battle. Instead of a quest party, you’ve got a ship crew, but they also serve the same purpose, granting an array of bonuses on the battlefield.


The world of Galactrix is huge, and there’s always something to keep players busy. The game does a pretty good job of keeping track of your quests, and the interface always seems to point you in the right direction. There are some 50 nodes to explore, each with its own planet within. Players can mine various minerals (playing a variation of the battle game) and take their booty to other star systems to trade and get better equipment. Unfortunately someone at Infinite Interactive had the bright idea to lock down every jump node in the game – players have to hack each gate in order to gain access, which requires playing yet another variation of the battle game, but this one is much more frustrating due to a restrictive time limit and very specific gem requirements. It’s be fine if this hacking game was used sparingly, but having to unlock each jump gate when you want to go to a new system is a laborious task which sucks a lot of the fun out of the game.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix doesn’t strike with the same force as its predecessor, but it’s still a quality title. Infinite Interactive has done a pretty good job of applying the basic formula to a new world and building upon the basic puzzle game with the new hexagonal matching approach. However, certain aspects of the game feel either needlessly complicated or are just totally unnecessary. Part of the key to Challenge of the Warlords’ was in its simplicity; Galactrix has far too many variables at play from the minute you start - if you stick to it, it can be an enjoyable experience, but it could have been better.