Puzzle Quest: Galactrix Review

Game Over Online is next to review Infinite Interactive’s puzzling RPG, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, giving the title an 80% rating.

One of the main gripes I have with Puzzle Quest: Galactrix are the LeapGates. The galaxy is linked by LeapGates. Ships use them to travel from one system to another. As the story begins, all of the LeapGates are offline. You have to hack the LeapGates in order to travel. Here’s the thing: There are dozens of systems in the galaxy, often with two or more LeapGates each, so you’ll end up hacking upwards of a hundred LeapGates during the course of the campaign and there isn’t much variety in the LeapGate hacking mini-game (unlike say combat, where encounters offer more variables), not to mention success at higher difficulty levels is often dependent on the quality of the starting board. It doesn’t take long before the LeapGates become quite a nuisance.

There are other, smaller issues as well. The story takes a fair bit of time to pick up steam and the campaign in general lacks personality. Enemies in Challenge of the Warlords were easily recognizable and offered skill sets unique to their creature type. In Galactrix, every Faction is a faceless group, represented solely by their spacecraft. After you’ve played the game long enough those spaceships start to blend together, leaving even less room to distinguish one enemy from another.