Sometimes going free to play isn't worth the price
The first Puzzle Quest combined match-three puzzles with RPG elements to great success. Puzzle Quest 3 adds free-to-play mechanics to the pile and ends up with far less than it started with.
After playing Puzzle Quest 3 on Steam for a dozen hours, I went out and bought the 2019 Switch port of 2007’s Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, Puzzle Quest: The Legend Returns, because the latter is fundamentally superior as both a puzzle game and a consumer product.
As its name implies, Infinity Plus Two’s Puzzle Quest 3 is a sequel to Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and 2010’s Puzzle Quest 2, released in early access on Android in 2021 and launched in early access on Steam this year. The first two games were charming and engaging, as was the sci-fi sidequel Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. In the decade-plus since those games came out, however, the developer has focused on free-to-play, licensed Puzzle Quest games for mobile devices, like Adventure Time Puzzle Quest, Magic: The Gathering Puzzle Quest, and Marvel Puzzle Quest. That trajectory has led to the third core game in the Puzzle Quest series to use a full free-to-play model, rather than a single-purchase retail game. That’s bad enough since this model erects barriers to content that can only be passed with long waits or real money. It’s made worse by the fact that those barriers are staggeringly slow even for a free-to-play game.
The core concept of Puzzle Quest 3 is the same as that of the first two games. It’s a match-three puzzle game with RPG elements such as equipment, skills, and character levels giving a sense of progression and strategy your typical Bejeweleds and Candy Crushes lack. Each puzzle round is a fight against an enemy, where you alternate turns with your opponent. Different gems give you different types of mana or let you attack directly with your weapon, and you can spend mana to use skills to affect the game board, buff yourself, or damage the enemy.
Beyond simply matching three gems in a row, the puzzle mechanics in Puzzle Quest 3 are slightly different than the first game—and faster. The 5-by-7 board is much smaller than the original’s 8-by-8 board, and instead of moving only one gem at a time you have a few seconds to move any gem that can be slid to match three or add on to a match. You can also slide gems diagonally, which means you can build up chains of gems very easily if you’re fast enough (though this speed-based matching probably feels much better on a touch screen than with a mouse).
You start by choosing from one of five different classes: assassin, barbarian, necromancer, paladin, or shaman. Each class has an affinity for different types of mana and uses unique skills with that mana based around their themes. Assassins can perform sudden powerful attacks, barbarians can destroy blocks of gems, paladins can heal, and so on.
As you play, your character gains experience and collects different pieces of equipment that improve their stats, and even finds new skills that can be shuffled in and out of four active slots. Every piece of equipment can be upgraded using various resources, and each has a rarity tier that further determines its value. Another type of collectible resource can upgrade that equipment’s rarity, and skills can also be upgraded with yet another set of resources. You also find companions that provide various services and enable side quests, along with minions that can be sent out to do your bidding, and they can all be upgraded with their own resources as well.
This all sounds like a lot of RPG elements that make the otherwise-simple match-three equation feel deep and strategic. On paper it does, which is why it worked so well for the original Puzzle Quest 15 years ago. There are two problems with Puzzle Quest 3’s execution. First the free-to-play aspect rears its ugly head, closing the valve on those fun ideas until they come out only as the tiniest trickle.
Puzzle Quest 3 makes you wait, and wait, and wait for any sense of progression. You can get experience and gold simply by playing levels and fighting monsters, but you won’t get anywhere with that alone. Your effectiveness is determined primarily by your equipment, which you generally only get from treasure chests. Those treasure chests also provide the different resources you need to upgrade anything in the game. You can’t open treasure chests by yourself; you need to use rare keys you occasionally find, send your minions to open them (which takes from an hour to a day depending on the rarity of the chest), or pay gems to open them. Gems are the semi-premium currency you can buy with money or earn slowly in-game as you play through story missions and earn achievements.
The kicker? You can only have three chests waiting for unlocking at once (four if you pay $10 per month for VIP membership). That’s three slots to wait on for any of the resources you desperately need to progress.
And that need comes fast. After blazing through the first “gimme” chapter of the game’s flimsy story, I ran into a hard wall near the end of the second chapter where the power numbers (your and your enemies’ health and damage levels) for each round shot up well past what I had naturally reached. It took an hour to get through the first chapter and most of the second. It’s been two days waiting for chests to unlock so I can upgrade my gear to stand a chance at the end of the second chapter. I eventually managed to push past the second chapter and even the third, but by then the trickling of progression was getting slower and slower, and I was getting less and less interested. These staccato spikes in difficulty ratings appeared nearly random, as well, with certain story quests rated much higher than my current power numbers and the ones immediately after them (after getting quite lucky) settling back down to a reasonable level.
These mechanics are to be expected in a free-to-play game, but they’re sudden and harsh in Puzzle Quest 3. Puzzles & Dragons and Gems of War both progress much more naturally without spending money or waiting an interminable amount of time. Their energy systems limit how many rounds you can play at once, but the pacing never feels throttled or unreasonable, and the resources and random loot are balanced fairly well while still making microtransactions enticing to get very rare monsters or items.
I actually enjoy those latter games. Puzzles & Dragons is consistently a blast (though I’d still rather see a new Puzzles & Dragons: Super Mario Bros. Edition for the Switch than load up the free-to-play original on my iPad). Gems of War helped tickle my Puzzle Quest nostalgia while still feeling more satisfying with its better pacing of progression requirements. I usually find one-purchase games preferable to free-to-play ones, but even free-to-play can be done reasonably well.
To demonstrate the monetization aspect of the game, 505 Games gave me a “welcome pack” consisting of 1,000 crowns (the money-only in-game currency) and a variety of keys and other items, about the equivalent of a $25 purchase in the game. The resources let me advance a good bit, thanks to the keys and the ability to simply buy packs of upgrade material for 5 to 25 crowns depending on the tier of item I wanted to upgrade. Buying more keys, on the other hand, was different story. A key bundle that includes one high tier key and five second-highest tier keys costs 750 crowns, “discounted” from 1,250 crowns. It cost $20 to buy 1,120 crowns. This is without the $10 monthly VIP pass, though that only provides a daily bonus of one third-highest tier key and various store offers and reward benefits for progression.
The welcome pack helped speed up improving my character in the game, but not wildly, and I still had to cope with the glacial progression to acquire and unlock treasure chests if I wanted new equipment or to continue upgrading. Through all of this, I kept thinking that Puzzle Quest: The Legend Returns is just $15 on the Switch and features the full first game, with DLC and some additional classes to play.
The second problem with Puzzle Quest 3 is that it’s mechanically a lesser game than the original Puzzle Quest, even without the free-to-play elements. The original Puzzle Quest had you taking turns against the opponent, who obeyed the same movement and skill rules you did. This meant you had to think ahead to make sure your move didn’t set the board up in a way that benefitted the enemy, like letting them attack by matching skulls, filling up the mana they need for their own skills, or getting extra turns by matching four or more tiles in a row.
In Puzzle Quest 3, enemies feel less like opponents and more like health-draining walls to rush against, because they don’t actually take turns and move tiles on the board. Instead, they simply attack you, occasionally using skills that can change tiles or inflict status effects. There’s no consideration for what move they might make after your turn, because they don’t take turns like you do. They just alternate between dealing damage and using skills.
Fights are made even less interesting by equipment and skills being far simpler than in Puzzle Quest. In the first game, you had seven skill slots instead of four, giving you more strategies to work with in building mana and affecting the board with your abilities. On top of that, your weapon and armor had far more unique effects instead of just stat and mana buffs, such as providing damage bonuses or creating tiles under certain conditions. You couldn’t upgrade individual equipment pieces or skills like you can in Puzzle Quest 3, but the sheer diversity of effects made fights in the first game so much deeper.
Worse still, fights are all you will do in Puzzle Quest 3. Every encounter and quest is framed as a series of one-on-one fights against enemies, usually between two and five of them. PVP fights are the exception. These are single matches against AI versions of other players based on their stats and equipment. There’s no straight head-to-head between players. The first Puzzle Quest had different variations of match-three puzzle games depending on the situation, like fixed puzzles to capture monsters or matching enough pieces together to produce forge tiles to craft items. Puzzle Quest 3 only has shallow, one-sided fights.
In terms of performance, at least, Puzzle Quest 3 works fine. It has simple 3D graphics for characters and enemies, and both their movements and tile effects on the board look consistently smooth and stable. This is the only advantage the game has over the 2019 Switch port of the original Puzzle Quest, which bafflingly chugs during big gem combos. The Windows version isn’t perfect, however, and I repeatedly ran into a bug where a board would load but I couldn’t interact with anything on the screen, forcing me to close the game and restart it.
In a vacuum, Puzzle Quest 3 would simply be a capable free-to-play game with a strong premise hindered by painfully slow pacing. With the original Puzzle Quest in mind, it’s a disappointing step back that’s more shallow and less interesting than its 15-year-old predecessor. And that just isn’t worth it being free, regardless of the platform.
If you don’t mind spending a few dollars on the puzzle RPG idea, the first Puzzle Quest is available on Steam for $10, and the Switch port with DLC is $15. If you want to stick with free and have a smartphone or tablet, Puzzles & Dragons is still one of the best games in the genre, and its pacing is much better, even without any microtransactions.
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The first Puzzle Quest combined match-three puzzles with RPG elements to great success. Puzzle Quest 3 adds free-to-play mechanics to the pile and ends up with far less than it started with.
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Will Greenwald has been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over a decade, specializing in TVs, media streaming devices, headphones, game consoles, game accessories, and virtual reality. He’s reviewed well over 1,000 consumer electronics products and has written dozens of extensive guides to products in his fields.
His particular expertise is in TV and home entertainment technology. Will is a certified ISF Level III TV calibrator and THX Level I home theater installer, which ensures the thoroughness and accuracy of his TV reviews. In addition, he has also tested and reviewed every major game console and consumer VR headset of the last three system generations.
Will has been covering consumer technology for over 15 years. In addition to PCMag, his work and analysis has been seen in CNET, GamePro, Geek.com, Maximum PC, Sound & Vision, and other publications. He also enjoys fiction writing, photography, and building Gunpla model kits.
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