| OUR RATING:
8
GREAT
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TANGIBLES:
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Why you should buy it: You’ve conquered Challenge of the Warlords and are looking for a new mountain to conquer.
Why you should rent it: The sci-fi setting doesn’t interest you as much as the medieval setting of the original. |
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UNIQUE RATING:
8
  SUGGESTION:
Buy It |
Written by: Chris Selogy | Tags: Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, Xbox 360
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix’s biggest hook is that it is basically Puzzle Quest in space. The story starts with your character just getting out of the MRI academy with a bit of a leg up with a fairly nice ship to start off with. You’re thrust into the middle of the story as the network on the leap gates, which are the gateways between star systems, goes down and your search for the reason for their downtime to be much more serious than a bad internet connection. Along the way, you gain a few crew members that offer their own services to aid you along the way in the form of new minigames to accomplish different feats.
Besides the new setting, Galactrix’s biggest change is the new hexagonal gems that are used in the puzzle combat gameplay. It’s a bit confusing at first to figure out how to preemptively judge where the gems will fall in the new zero gravity combat system, but you can quickly figure out that they fall in the direction that you move the gem to make a match. Your spells are now simply parts you can buy for your ship to give you special abilities to use if you have its required amount of mana first. The major improvement in terms of the balancing of the combat is that the AI no longer cheats so aggressively, so it doesn’t pull amazing combos out of thin air all that much more often than you can.
With each of your crew members in Galactrix adding a new minigame to add to what you can do in the game, it’s a bit of a nice method of introducing these additional layers to you. The unfortunate thing is that the first minigame that is introduced to you is one that could turn you off of the game early on, which is the hacking minigame that the story forces upon you near the beginning of the game. The hacking minigame basically has a list of colored gem combos you need to make in a certain time frame, which is a fun game in moderation.
Galactrix’s major flaw in the gameplay and story is that you have to hack the leap gates to get from star system to star system, but there are dozens of star systems with at least two or three leap gates per star system so you can easily get through a few dozen without putting much of a dent into the campaign. There should have been something done to limit the amount of hacking you need to do early on would have been a major change to the game to keep it from being such a drag early on. Whether that would be a story point where you fix the issue a few hours in or a way to level up the hacking to let you auto-hack the easy leap gates and keep the few remaining gates that are harder in your way.
If you are able to get the vast majority of the hacking done, Galactrix’s charms and that addictive nature that Puzzle Quest is known for starts to kick in. As you are able to focus on taking quests, fighting enemies, playing the other minigames, finding new ship parts and doing all of this in the quest for leveling up to increase your stats, the game quickly starts to turn sessions you intend to be short into hours of addictive enjoyment when you realize it’s late and you need to get to bed as soon as possible. It’s a shame that not many will see that portion of the game, whether they are turned off by all of the early hacking or being told to not play the game due to early negative buzz. There is multiplayer to help extend the game’s lifespan a bit, but nobody’s really buying a puzzle-RPG for the multiplayer, so it’s just a nice side mode for a distraction from the main campaign.
The rest of Galactrix’s minigames offer a nice variety in fun that change up the pace of what you’re doing with those gems. You get a haggling minigame to lower prices of parts in the shops, mining comets for ingredients you can use in the crafting minigame, and gathering rumors for more background info on the story and the universe that you’re in. These offer slightly different takes on the basic gem-switching gameplay that used in moderation enough that they stay interesting for the entire campaign.
A major part of Galactrix are the factions that run different star systems, whose opinion of you changes as you run into other factions and fight or befriend them. The end result can lead to being confronted by factions that dislike you upon crossing their star systems and forced into battle. You eventually learn an ability to essentially use Jedi mind tricks to get them off of your back that helps keep that from being too much of a hassle when crossing the galaxy. You do get to own up to three spaceships that you can easily switch between to take advantage of different part/spell set-ups or possibly even to take advantage of inherent things that come along with ships branded with different factions on them, though it seems to not be all that useful at a point when you’re pretty much neutral to everyone regardless of what the faction ratings may contradict with that point. At that point, we had to resort to picking fights ourselves to level up as the quests required us to fight much higher-leveled enemies.
The inherent HD abilities of the Xbox 360 add a lot to Galactrix’s visuals as the beautiful entity that is space really shines in HD. The backgrounds you’ll find for each of the star systems looks great, though the planets that are located in those systems are just a few different types of planets that are reused throughout your travels. The various races are interesting enough, if a bit typical as far as having different factions of humans and then having humanoid versions of a few types of animals. The music is fairly good but does get a little bit aggravating after hearing the same pieces of music all of the time.
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix definitely gives off a bad first impression that those persistent enough will find the same addictive qualities that the original Puzzle Quest had in spades. One simple change in the approach to the hacking minigame could’ve changed the way the entire game feels, from a repetitive disappointment into a worthy successor. Galactrix may be a bit much to pay for an XBLA game at $20, or 1600 points, but those that do pay for the game will likely try to get past the early rough patch to make sure they get their money’s worth out of the game. It’s best to just play the demo to see if the new tweaks to the combat interest you enough to jump in for the entire game as a whole.
| The Alpha Centauri star system is home to the closest star to the Earth that is not the Sun, but is still a long distance away from the Earth. In smaller terms, the Sun would be a basketball set in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States and the Alpha Centauri star system would be located near Moscow, Russia. |
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| Published by: | D3 Publisher of America |
| Developed by: | Infinite Interactive |
| Genre: | Role-Playing |
| # of Players: | 1-4 |
| ESRB Rating: | Everyone 10+ |
| Release Date: | US: February 27th, 2009 |
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Gamer 2.0 Rating: 8.2 | User Rating: N/A
Gamer 2.0 Rating: 7 | User Rating: N/A
Gamer 2.0 Rating: 8.4 | User Rating: N/A
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