Puzzle Quest 2Follow

This game came out today for DS and XBLA. I personally purchased it on XBLA for 1200 microsoft points. I absolutely loved the first game, and from what I've read this one is even better. I have not gotten to play it yet, but will definitely be doing so tonight. If anyone else plans on getting this game (and I highly recommend it), I'd love to play against some people at some point.

Game's been out for a little longer for DS; I've already beaten it. I think it's a good design, and it has some noticeable improvements over the first one. It's still very, very repetitive though, and there are still some pointlessly awkward design decisions, such as clunky menus.

For a game with so much potential customization, I wish more of it made a difference. Boost your main stat, set spells and equip gear that benefit from that stat, and then just repeat farming mana/action and using it. There was never any real need to tweak or experiment because I always win easily by doing the same thing over and over and over. Upgrading gear was never necessary because better stuff always appeared for sale anyway, and money is basically unlimited. You'd think with all the different enemy types you'd start to need alternative strategies, but nope.

It's a great sequel for anyone who liked the first one, but sometimes it feels like the designers never actually played it. There are just too many unnecessary or underused design elements for the game to feel polished.

I played as a Barbarian. I never had to do anything but build up action points and use my giant weapon, and use spells to facilitate doing those things. For a while I alternated boosting Strength (mostly just to increase my chance of a critical hit) and Agility (to build Action points faster) but then I got a spell to easily get Action, and after that I just pumped all my stats into Strength because it didn't really matter anyway. Even the few monsters with special gimmicks attached to their fights died so quickly and easily that it wasn't worth bothering with the "special" fight element (that was vague; trying to avoid spoilers, and it's less exciting than I make it sound). This is on the hardest setting, too. I didn't mind it so much when I was seeing my character grow from the fights, but once I hit the level cap I lost any remaining enthusiasm doing the same thing over and over.

I upgraded my gear a bunch of times, just to realise that the purchasable items in town were improving at a better rate than upgrading. But, the freebies I got from chests were more than enough to win easily anyway, so I never did bother buying anything.

I never had any sense of the computer "cheating" -- it occasionally got very, very lucky with falling blocks, but then so did I, so it balanced. I think one giant improvement in this game over the original is how much less powerful giant lucky streaks are. I once counted the computer getting a combo of 27 matches in a row, and I still didn't even come close to losing the fight. So, you'll never be killed from a un/lucky streak. My only real complaint about the AI is that a couple of mob types are designed with moves that they can rotate to basically play forever, until only bad luck breaks the combo. I wouldn't mind so much if those almost-endless move loops were dangerous, but you take so little damage from them that it just amounts to a really boring waste of time while you wait to finally get your turn.

I don't want to give the impression I didn't like the game, though -- I did. But, it's a bit frustrating that it comes off as so unpolished. For the first game, a small company got a surprise hit, and it's understandable that they didn't have the resources to smooth things over. PQ2, though, is the third in the series, and they should have had the resources and experience to fine-tune it a little better than it turned out. Five minutes of playing and some common sense would have suggested better menu design, for example. Why include difficulty settings when even the hardest setting is a cakewalk? Why give all these monsters unique abilities if the gameplay ends up the same anyway?

I'm really hoping that versus play is fun, though, and that alone could potentially redeem all my criticisms.

Well, I doubt you can play me on my DS version (which I think is only local multiplayer anyway?). I wouldn't expect it to account for players of different levels, since I'm not sure how it would deal with stat gains. That said, you hit the level cap well before the end of the game, and I stopped seeing meaningfully better gear by about the halfway mark, so it shouldn't be necessary to fully beat the game to be competitive in multiplayer.

I was wondering if Barbarian might be overpowered, but if it's not then all those many, many duels (which don't even power you up any more after you cap) would just be more tedious for being longer. I'll definitely try with another job, to see how differently it plays. I'd also love to see how the jobs balance in multiplayer.

Now that you've got both, check and see if the redundant and badly-designed menus are the same. The DS version has a very unintuitive interface (every time I start playing, my first impulse is to delete my save, since the delete button is where I'd expect the go button to be) and requires more clicks than it should. Is the "big" version better, or the same?

The DS is very oddly laid out and I am still not used to it, so I agree with you there. The 360 is better, although not perfect. At the very least it's easier to get used to. I think that the PC interface was perfect for the first game and maybe I'm unfairly comparing it to that, but it was simple and intuitive. If they release a PC version of 2 you should get that.