Technical Errors Ruin Experience
posted by madrain (MINNEAPOLIS, MN) May 18, 2009
Member since Aug 2006
First off, I really like Puzzle Quest as a puzzle game. I own it on the PC and enjoy playing it there, and while the extreme cutbacks in graphics, presentation, and even gameplay on the DS port were disappointing, they were not entirely unexpected. The DS is not very powerful, after all.
What earns this review a 1 is the horrible use of the touch screen. Wherever you touch is completely off. Occasionally if you do not hit exactly the right pixel when moving gems (or navigating the map, or choosing from a menu), the game will act as if you clicked a portion far off beyond the edge of the screen. Gems nowhere near your stylus will flip, and on the navigation screens your ship will fly off on its own towards the border of the screen.
If it were only on menus it would not be a dealbreaker, but with the majority of the early game consisting of a horrible mini-game called Hacking LeapGates, the seconds taken to flip non-matching tiles back and forth (tiles you did NOT select) will cost you the game more often than not. Then you must start over, and the minigame is hard enough on its own when everything is working correctly.
I can not imagine that this game received even an hour's worth of quality assurance on the DS port. They left horrible technical errors that make the game far more frustrating than it's worth. If you want to play it, try it on a different system, like PC or buy it from XBox Live.
Don't even rent it for the DS. You will regret it.
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