Village Gamer

Official Website: Puzzlegeddon
Format: PC
Developer: Pieces Interactive
Publisher: Pieces Interactive
Genre: Action
ESRB Rating: E – Everyone

Puzzle games are not really my thing, I get bored easily matching shapes or colours or putting numbers in some sequence; so when I was asked to review Puzzlegeddon I was kind of dubious to try it. After setting up my profile I decided to run through the tutorial, usually I regret doing this but not with Puzzlegeddon; the tutorial was informative, concise and you didn’t have to wait forever while some character told you what to do. A quick look at the puzzle board reveals squares of four colours, and placing five or more of them together and right clicking causes them to clear. On top of the puzzle are four meters of matching colours that fill up as you clear tiles from the board.

A quick run through the tutorial and I was off to try and beat the evil robots in a single player game. I chose a short timed game with two easy robots for opponents and it was a very quick game, my colour matching skills aren’t quite up to par it seems. That first game, although quick was very helpful. Filling up each of the meters to different levels yields new and exciting ways to blast your opponents to oblivion! Of course filling up other ones save you from being blown into little pieces yourself. Finally I won against the two easy robots so I thought I would put in one hard robot to go with the two easy ones; there was nothing left of me put a few pieces of dust blowing somewhere in the wind a few miles away. Looks like it’s going to take some practice before I’m ready for him.

When you are defeated, there is a mini-puzzle that you can defeat to get back into the game, assuming there is time left and the game doesn’t end first. These puzzles were much harder than the main puzzle but still a lot of fun. The only thing I didn’t really like about this is that they were fairly dark. I would expect it to be darker and not the bright colours of the main game but a few times I had to lean closer to the monitor to be able to see what was on some of the tiles.

Puzzlegeddon is an amazingly well done game and is extremely easy to get hooked on. If you can get past the first game or two then you will be playing late into the night (or morning as my case was). The second time I played the game, I figured I would play for a few hours and then go do the rest of the things I had to do for the day. It didn’t work out nearly that way, after playing for nearly 8 hours I finally managed to close the game and get started on the other things that had to be done. I haven’t had a chance to play the multi-player games yet but I can only imagine how much fun it will be to play against people instead of bots. If you don’t see me around, you’ll know right where to fine me, launching missiles at my friends!