To suggest Puzzlegeddon is confusing would be understating the meaning of ‘confusing’. Your first hour with the game is likely to leave you utterly bewildered, and ultimately frustrated. It’s a bizarre combination of genres that aims to be something unique and exciting, but just ends up being not much fun.
To get the point across, I’ll describe the gameplay of Puzzlegeddon. Puzzlegeddon is a puzzle/strategy hybrid game. Battles take place on a spherical planet with contenders dotted around the outside. You have to complete a Bejewelled-esque match-five puzzle in the middle of the screen in order to amass resources, which you can use to attack other players, reinforce your base, and deflect attacks to lower an opponent’s defences. While you are doing this, each of your opponents are also amassing resources and throwing out attacks at each other or at you.
All of this happens in real-time, with no pauses, all on one screen. It’s enough to make you want to weep at the overwhelming onslaught of stuff that’s happening. You’ll be trying to complete the puzzle fast enough to amass enough resources to deflect the two missiles flying at you whilst also trying to weaken an opponent in order to launch an attack of your own whilst trying to clear a black hole someone placed over your head and dealing with a move restriction someone else put on you.
The game’s presentation doesn’t help. Not so much the graphics, the graphics are great. Everything looks lovely, colourful, bouncy and charming. The trouble is everything looks all of these things, all the time. You have to look at the puzzle section, keep an eye on your four resource piles, and watch out for incoming enemy attacks. It’s not something human eyes are built for, and the slew of colour and gloss makes it impossible to keep up. The simple, cheery but repetitive music just makes it sound like the game is laughing at your ineptitude.
The main problem is the game goes out of its way to be complicated, as if complex gameplay equates deep gameplay. It tries to do too many things at once. None of the ideas are bad; the match-5 puzzle is slick and works nicely, with lots of opportunity to set up massive combos and multipliers. The strategy aspect is a nice simple take on tower defence. The cartoony presentation is reasonably charming and fun to look at. They just don’t work together. It all ends up as an overwhelming mess that seems so hostile in its determination to be complex that it gives you little incentive to keep playing.
Even the menus are complicated; you have to confirm your way through about five screens of pointless options before you can start a simple deathmatch. The tutorial does a reasonable job of explaining what you are supposed to be doing, but doesn’t make actually doing it any easier. The AI difficulty curve is steep, with even opponents on the easiest setting happy to decimate a new player who will still be struggling to simply understand what’s going on. All chances are you will spend your first hour of the game in a cloud of confusion, frustration and hate.
If the game was structured to lead you in gently, introducing its many gameplay caveats one at a time and giving you time to play around with each one, then there’s a chance you could grow to love it. But it doesn’t. After the short tutorial throws everything at you, then it chucks you in at the deep end, where the over-eager AI will likely make light work of you in short time. Learning a game by repeatedly getting your ass handed to you just isn’t much fun.
The thing is, Puzzlegeddon isn’t a bad game. Everything about it works just fine. It just isn’t very enjoyable. Once you’ve trained your eyes to deal with the game’s unique brand of eye-strain, the game does click, and you do start to enjoy yourself. But it just lends the question as to what the point is. Puzzlegeddon draws influence from a number of genres, but doesn’t do any of them especially well. It’s far too complex to be a simple time-wasting puzzler, but not deep enough to be a satisfying strategy game. I was left wondering whether such a strange crossover between puzzle and strategy really appeals to anyone.
Online play is a nice inclusion, as playing against human players evens out the difficulty curve and makes the game’s unique challenges much more fun. The lack of a local multiplayer is disappointing; this would actually make a fairly fun party game; four players crowded around the screen all shouting in confused rage would have suited the game’s overwhelming aesthetic perfectly. Outside of deathmatch mode, there’s also a ‘poison’ mode, which strips away all the strategy and competitive element to leave you with match-five puzzle challenges against the clock. Tellingly, I had a lot more fun with this mode than I did with deathmatch mode, which makes up the bulk of the game.
Puzzlegeddon is difficult to recommend. If the gameplay outlined above sounds like fun to you, then go ahead. The game is solid and does what it does well. But for those of you on the fence, I’d suggest you stay away; the satisfaction that comes from mastering the game simply isn’t worth the confusion and frustration it takes to get there.
VideogameUK verdict: 5/10
VGR Network
Xboxer360