Jon and I are officially addicted to Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. It’s an inventive blend of RPG and Puzzle game play. Basically, any time you ‘fight’ someone, you’re playing a gem-matching game where you and the computer take turns moving gems and match three (or more) of a kind. When you match the ‘mine’ gems, you damage your opponent. The twist is, you also have ‘weapons’ that allow you to do extra things to the game board, like remove all of one color of gem!

Like an RPG, there are quests and a story line to follow. It is a sci-fi game, so the story involves hacking transport gates, which is done by playing a gem matching mini-game, so you can travel through space and track the enemy ships. You can also mine materials and craft them into new weapons, and haggle at the shops for reduced prices, both with slightly different versions of the gem mini-game.

The game play is more challenging than you might expect. Depending on how you move the gems on the board, new gems can come from one of six sides. It’s not the ordinary drop-from-the-top style you might expect. I like this a lot because it adds an element of strategy many other puzzle games just don’t have.

Additionally, Jon and I have determined that it has some of the best music of any game we’ve played. It’s simple, but it just doesn’t get old. The music for the first game may be slightly better… but Galactrix is still darn good.

Confused? Intrigued? Go check out X-Play’s review, and then check out the free demo! It’s terribly fun!!