Xbox 360

Puzzle Chronicles

Overall, I found Puzzle Chronicles to be worth my time and enjoyed playing it enough to disregard its cosmetic flaws. If you’re not the type to let a game’s superficial features – like low-budget graphics and uninspired voice acting – get you down, you’ll probably find Puzzle Chronicles an engaging and entertaining puzzle game. While the story-related RPG elements aren’t anything to write home about, the mechanical RPG elements - such as equipment effects and your hero and Warbeast’s statistics and abilities – do add significant interest and complexity to the game. If you have half a gig to spare on your 360’s storage device and could use a solid puzzle game, Puzzle Chronicles is a decent choice for $10.

Puzzle Chronicles is not as polished as previous Puzzle outings, there are some interface shortcomings and a certain amount of grind to progress the story. But the game retains that ‘just one more battle’ addictiveness, and entertaining, tension filled game-play that remains a hallmark of the marquee.

Puzzle Quest super fans will be able to look past Chronicles' awful visuals and enjoy the fantasy puzzling it offers on the inside. But it is ugly as sin and doesn't do anything remarkably different from its inspiration. Let me put it this way: If Puzzle Quest is a super hot girl, Puzzle Chronicles is her homely friend with a nice personality.

The overall game is a tight package - the graphics are simple; most of the time, you are looking at a Tetris-like gamefield, barely paying attention to the animated hero and monsters duking it out over the play field - and when not engaged in a match, the game has you navigating through a simply illustrated map screen where you travel about, encountering the threats and challenges that lead you along to your next puzzle fight. The voice acting is a bit hammy and Satursh, but it dovetails with the simple graphical style of the game, so it doesn't feel off. And the music isn't so repetitive or irritating that you'll be diving for the MP3 player to plug into the USB slot on the front of your 360 immediately. In all, Puzzle Quest is a pleasant surprise - it's an evolution of a first brave step, combining two very unlikely bedfellows - fantasy role playing and tetris-style puzzle play - in a hybrid where one rewards the other and you just want to keep playing.

Perhaps the best way to describe Puzzle Chronicles is that it feels like an effort out of Infinite's "B" team. We know the company can do so much better, yet Puzzle Chronicles looks and feels more like a college project rather than a AAA XBLA title. It is also somewhat odd to see Puzzle Chronicles releasing now, with Puzzle Quest 2 right around the corner. Although the two games are published by different companies, Infinite is essentially competing with itself. We can only hope that Infinite's "A" team worked on Puzzle Quest 2 because if Puzzle Chronicles is any indication, it's quite possible that Infinite has lost its magic touch.

Even if the game were technically sound, Puzzle Quest 2 has since been released, so going with the lesser option of Puzzle Chronicles would be a poor investment on just about every level.