Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords took everyone by surprise. An adventure world in which you upgraded wizards and warriors with experience points then fought enemies in games of Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest successfully merged two different genres. Fans were hooked, and they wanted more. More is finally here, and it's in the form of Puzzle Kingdom, which looks every bit as fun as its predecessor.
Puzzle Kingdom stands alone as its own role-playing adventure and is more of a spiritual successor to Puzzle Quest than a true sequel. The kingdom of Etheria is in trouble, and it's up to you to use your puzzling skills to defeat the enemy hordes. The game opens as you choose a male or female warlord. The warlord will recruit heroes to his or her banner, each with varying skills and abilities. Our first hero was a level-one old man, the equivalent of Glass Joe in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. You simply command your hero around an overworld map of Etheria, and often he'll be ransacked by bandits or enter an enemy township, triggering a, what else? Puzzle battle.
DGS-Online writes: "Infinite Interactive is really only one trick. It means only the art of "gem-swapping" and have a penchant for fantasy RPG's. This mix it some time to deftly cocktails as addictive Puzzle Quest and Puzzle Quest Galactix. Puzzle Kingdoms is the third product of the shy developer and although the trick begins to be transparent, there is also no question of boredom."
Empire writes: "For a game that looks awful and feels like something you played on a Super NES over a decade ago, Puzzle Kingdoms is hard to put down.
A sequel to the all-conquering Puzzle Quest, Kingdoms closely follows the winning template established by its predecessor; using a board of Tetris-style tiles that move in columns, players must slide the bricks to make coloured groups, these combinations in turn giving players the power to unleash military attacks using virtual armies. The opportunity to customise your troops for specific battles also brings a fresh layer of strategy to the familiar block busting, and a host of minigames that offer different takes on traditional arcade puzzling bring much-needed variety to the brain-melting action."
Gamer writes: "With the seemingly impossible combination of a puzzle game and an RPG Puzzle Quest in 2008 did the hands on each other. The RPG part was the much-needed addition to the combination of colors for more than a few hours to keep interesting. Puzzle Quest now getting quite a following, among other Neopets: Puzzle Adventure and Puzzle Kingdoms. Yet post-aperij no real means all clones, including this, have so far of the Puzzle Quest developer Infinite Interactive himself, apparently happy to lap penetrates every publisher who also "Puzzle Questje 'wishes. But how you compete with yourself?"
