Ok to sum it up, this is Puzzle Quest 2 combined with a CCG game. And by CCG, I mean more Magic or Hearthstone than Rage of Bahamut/Legend of the Cryptids or those other auto-battle and fuse games. There's no fusing cards. You can level up cards with Souls which you earn through questing and PVP. You can disenchant cards to get more Souls to use on your other cards. No timers! Quests cost gold though but you earn it as you play. You also accrue a certain amount of gold per day depending on your home kingdom. IAP currency is gems. Looks like you can use gems to open premium chests to get better cards. I'm pretty sure the keys are given as progression awards as well though. But you can also use non-premium currency for chests. There's guilds and PVP that's probably why the internet connection is required. I don't see any guilds yet. PVP I havent' tried yet either but you gain Glory from PVP that you can use to purchase premium cards. You can customize the appearance of your hero. (well, gender and elf, human, lizard guy, cat guy, etc.) That's all for now, I've only played for like 20 minutes before I had to go back to work.
This looks too good to be true...tempted to make an NZ account to find out. Ok, this was truthfully made by Steve Fawkner at Infinite Interactive. Now I'm REALLY intrigued.
Is 505 Games not able to use the Puzzle Quest name anymore? Because if they titled it Puzzle Quest: Gems of War or something similar I believe it will have more exposure. I'm liking what I see so far. It FEELS like good old Puzzle Quest, and 505 synergized it with card collecting mechanics perfectly. It's like the guy who invented crack by combining coke with baking soda. (too much?)
Let's put it this way: After reading this, I couldn't wait to get home and downloaded using cellular data immediately! Screw you!
on Facebook they mention.: Gems of War for iOS is now available on the Aus/NZ App Store. Sorry to all our friends overseas, your turn will come soon, we promise.
Well, I just lost a massive post I had spent over an hour typing up. So, here's the short version, and I will be happy to answer questions. As a massive PQ fan, disappointed by every follow up game, I am SUPER impressed with this so far. Two hours+ gone in the blink of an eye. Looks like tons of content and things to do. Challenging, with lots of strategy. This is nothing like PQ2, so don't be dissuaded by references to that abomination. If anything, this is much closer to the ill-fated Puzzle Kingdoms, but with a much better/slicker implementation. Very, very excited. Some minor complaints: battles could be a bit crisper if they shortened animations a bit. One big thing is that when invading or defending, it doesn't appear you can see what units the enemies has, which is a bit frustrating given that it costs gold to fight. Then again, if you knew, it might make it too easy to cheese things, so I'm undecided if that is really bad or not. I can tell you that I consider myself pretty good at these types of games, but got my butt handed to me the one time I tried an invasion and a defense.
So I played this for about 30 minutes this morning and its pretty good actually! I havent done and invading or defending not even sure what that is but the quest stuff is good. I actually got a rare card on some draw from a chest so thats kind of cool.
This one is a bit more. Or hundreds of bits. Gems of War is a nearly official inofficial sequel to the Puzzle Quest franchise. Puzzle Quest is no casual puzzler, but a rather involved, complex RPG that resolves battles (and all other challenges, such as crafting, taming, researching, etc) through comparably complex match-3 mechanics, with twists such as special abilities that interact drastically with the board (changing gems en masse, setting up complex chains) or provide normal RPG-like effects (stealth and backstab, regen, rage, etc), weapons (and corresponding gems), passive abilities and lots of stats that affect matching, and the fact that matching does not do damage directly all the time, but feed your character mana for abilities. 505 Games and Infinite Interactive seems to basically have repacked the gameplay principle of the first Puzzle Quest (and the ill-fated Puzzle Kingdoms, and delightfully NOT PQ2), freemium-wrapped it, async PvP-spiced it up, mixed in som flavour of territorial conquest, and perhaps most notably, added a tactical TCG-based layer (which seems to mean more abilities and effects than ever, and the possibility to take additional troops into puzzle battle). I've yet to decide if the trend to add TCG mechanics to any genre but brown-washed military shooters is a good thing (though I do have a pal over at DICE. perhaps I can browbeat him into subtly subverse the designers towards Battlefield: Card Duel Warrior Generation), but in this case, I can imagine it could bring all good things (though all the usual freemium reservations apply, until I've explored the business model. Sounds fair from descriptions, though).
Reading this thread reminded me I bought the Puzzle Quest games on Steam a while back. I never got around to PQ1 on iOS before it was removed so maybe I'll fire that game up tonight at some point.
And let me tell you, it really adds something to the battles. I may have already lost more fights than an entire play through of PQ1. It has repeatedly kicked my butt at every turn.
I like it, mostly. Some things I've noticed: 1. The card aspect makes it harder to know what gem colors to level, since you may swap out your cards if you randomly draw some great ones of another clor than you've been leveling. What then? Can you respec? In PQ2 you could plan ahead for specific spells with a certain build in mind. 2. What is gold for again? Seems like there's 3 or 4 different currencies, two of which I know how to earn, main one of which I can't figure out a way to spend... 3. How do I know how many of a color I need before I can cast a units spell?
Not that I know of. Btw, you get weapons at certain mastery levels but the game doesn't tell you that. Each fight costs gold. It is also used to access new kingdoms, change your home kingdom, and to buy keys. You don't. It doesn't say anywhere. This is one of the things I have brought up on the developer forum...there's a lot of info hidden from the player
I ponied up the extra $200 to get a iPad with cellular so I couldn't care less about the always on Internet requirement. What I do care about is getting some more puzzle quest in my life and so far this delivers.
This is great to hear! Just last month I decided to download PQ2 again and starting playing through it and then got the Black Screen of Doom and lost everything and had to redelete it...sad days after I put in 4 days straight playing it all over again and reliving what I loved about PQ. This will surely satisfy my hunger for a good PQ game, so that being said. WHEN IS THIS COMING TO THE USA!!!
Gah! There always seems to be so much luck involved. Sometimes the enemy party gets so many lucky drops that end in 4+ matches and cascades. Oh, well--I guess this criticism applies to pretty much other PQ games
