After 2007's Puzzle Quest surprised just about everybody by taking Bejeweled and using it as a means of battle in a story-driven role-playing game, a handful of weird offshoots tried and mostly failed to take the idea to new avenues.
Puzzle Quest 2
Xbox 360 Live Arcade, Nintendo DS
Infinite Interactive/D3Publisher of America
Price: $US15
So it's no surprise to finally see Puzzle Quest 2, which brings the idea back to its roots and simply gets to tweaking from there.
The net worth of those tweaks will certainly vary to players of different disciplines.
The story is thin to the point of being boilerplate, and instead of capturing cities and managing armies, players rarely do more than move from fight to fight.
But while PQ2's outer shell feels dumbed down, the battles themselves are improved.
Standard fights feel considerably more balanced than PQ1's fights, which frequently approached untenably difficult levels, and the new item system aids an increase in gem types to let players win with skilled, creative play instead of waiting for the same old gems to appear.
PQ2 mixes in the occasional mini-game for variety's sake, but the fight system evolves enough to carry the surprisingly lengthy single-player campaign.
Naturally, players who want some human competition can find it via the game's two-player local and online (360 only) multiplayer, which function exactly as one hopes and expects they would.
