Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (The Legend Returns v2.7.0)

[DF]

This is another game I've tried many, many times in the past and fizzled out before long. So, would this time be a repeat?

Partially.

PuzzleQuest: Challenge of the Warlords

Game size: Roughly 99MB
Time played: Around 25.8 hours
Dates played: September 24 ~ November 08, 2024
Game status: I've played this before but have never beaten it until now. I didn't touch but a tiny bit of the expansion content.

PuzzleQuest: Challenge of the Warlords is a match-3 puzzle game mixed with RPG released for...damn near every platform in or after 2007. Blackberry phones! Apple iOS devices! Sony PlayStation 2 and 3 and 4 and Portable! Nintendo Wii! Microsoft Xbox 360! And then it got a remake as The Legend Returns on the Nintendo Switch! If it was a console around that time, it probably had this game on it.

Also, GameFAQs says this game's name is Puzzle Quest which is supported by Galactrix and 2 following suit while Steam says it's PuzzleQuest. I'll separate the words here, though.

Mods Used

The Legend Returns mod ports the content of the Switch remake to PC. Revenge of the Plague Lord was ported from consoles to PC already, and this adds Attack of the Golem Lord on top of that. So, you get a total of 13 classes, all of the equipment, and all of the enemies, too. I'm using v2.7.0. The mod author is making their own fan-made expansion, Mysteries of the Dream Lord.

Setting

There are rumblings that the undead are starting to rise and plague the lands of Etheria. Sent to investigate, you wind up involved in a plot involving the kidnapped citizens of your kingdom and a long-dead enemy who has chosen now to revive. It's time to gather allies and meet this foe head-on!...or it's time to just faff about the countryside while you get into fights with random monsters and try to learn their skills.

Etheria is your typical medieval fantasy land with kings and queens, knights, trolls, orcs, the undead, half-elves, magic, dragons, swords, and plenty of monsters with whom to throw down. The lands cover most of the fantasy settings from green fields to mountainous crags to desolate swamps, deserts, the grim up north, and even a volcano. Despite the various settings in the game, none of these impact the game except as window dressing.

And apparently, this is the same world as in the Warlords series, as in this game and sequel[www.gog.com] and Warlords Battlecry and its sequels. This is just way in the future? And instead of real-time strategy, it's a match-3 gem swap game.

Gameplay

You start the game by making a character. You have a dropdown list of classes, and each one has a short blurb about what they can do or what types of gems they're best with, and there are two portraits for men and two for women. The game randomly assigns you a name you can change here. So, with this limited amount of information, which class sounds like a winner to you?

Combat in this game happens on an 8x8 grid. If you're familiar with Bejeweled or other match-3 games, then you probably have an idea what to do--swap adjacent gems to make rows or columns of three or more, then those gems are collected or activated. The twist here is having an opponent, and you both take turns manipulating the one board. Part of the challenge is not only finding good matches for yourself but also making sure you don't set the table for your enemy to screw you over. The objective in each battle is to simply get your opponent to 0HP while trying to keep the same from happening to you. What kinds of gems are there?

There are nine types: Red, yellow, green, and blue gems are Mana colors, and these power spells. There are Purple Stars for Experience Points. You gain EXP as well for winning fights, but collecting extra in battle can always help. Gold Coins are money. You can spend this at Shops or in Your Citadel to unlock minigames or skill boosts. There are multiplier wildcard gems that only work with the red/yellow/green/blue gems, counting as any of the four and applying a multiplier between 2x and 8x as shown on the icon. And then there are Skulls. Match Skulls to deal damage to your opponent. There are also Glowing Skulls with +5 on their foreheads. When these are matched with other Skulls or are otherwise destroyed, they explode and destroy the eight gems around it (a 3x3 square with the Glowing Skull in the middle), you collect the destroyed gems, and they deal more damage than normal Skulls!

Matching three is nice, but what about other setups? Matching four like gems in a row will grant you an extra turn while five is an extra turn plus creating a wildcard gem. L-shaped or T-shaped matches just count as two separate matches of three, so that's one thing learned from Bejeweled that doesn't transfer across. If you manage to get a cascade of five matches with one move, you're given a Heroic Effort bonus of 100 EXP!

So, you've stocked up some mana and have spells ready to use. What do they do? Spells have a number of effects from simply dealing damage to manipulating the board in some way to applying status effects and so on. Each class has a set list of spells they learn naturally as they level, but if you invest in Your Citadel, you can eventually capture the enemies you fight and then learn their spells, albeit at a higher cost than when they use them. And there are even mounts that give you a small stat bonus plus their own spell! Spells almost always use up your turn, but if there are no good matches, this can be a good way to 'pass' or just get in a free hit.

You and your opponents have spell resistance for each of the four Mana colors. Starting out, this will be 0% for all four colors, but more ranks in the Morale skill will slowly grant bonuses to this along with equipment or passive enemy traits giving more points. Resistance only comes into play when spells are cast, and any color of Mana used by that spell is checked against the other side's resistances. If the spell is resisted, whatever effect the spell would've had is nullified and the caster still suffers the spell cost. So for example, you're fighting something with 30% green resist and 0% for the other three. If you cast a spell that uses green Mana at all, you have a 30% chance it'll fizzle out, but spells that don't use green will go through.

When it comes to equipment, you and opponents have four slots: Head, torso, weapon, and accessory. Items in this game aren't terribly exciting, but they're all passive effects like "50% chance to reduce incoming damage by 1 when taking damage of 2 or higher" or "+2 Life and Mana Points per turn when Red and Yellow Mana are 16+" or "+1 damage when dealing 3 or more damage". Effects that mention increasing damage only work when matching Skulls, but damage reduction effects apply to both Skulls and spells. Most gear can be found in stores that shuffle their wares after every fight, but some quests give you special items that can't be found elsewhere like the Rat King's Amulet (gain Gold whenever you gain Blue Mana).

And quests? Boy, there are a lot of them! There's a main quest line to follow, there are tons of sidequests, and some even have branching lines depending on what you choose to do! For example, the Necromancer you defeat early in a main quest can either be brought to a tower for interrogation or set free while your ally is away, and letting him go has ramifications way later on... Some quests can be repeatable, but a majority of them are 'go here, kill enemy, report back' in design.

Companions are also passive effects, but they only work against certain enemies. Darkhunter, your first ally, does 10 damage to undead enemies at the start of battle. Khalkus gives you a boost of 10 to your Battle stat when fighting mechanical enemies, and so on.

Gameplay Modes, Minigames, and Character Classes

There are a lot of things here. Where to begin? Let's look at the main menu when you boot up the game.

New Quest/Continue Quest
Quest mode is story mode. As an up-and-coming knight in Bartonia, you complete quests, slay monsters, grow stronger, and slowly uncover a plot involving dark forces in the north. If you've never played before, you'll have New Quest as an option and have to create a new character. After the voiced introduction, you appear on the world map, ready to start adventuring.

Single Player
This opens a second menu with a number of options allowing you to fight an opponent near your strength or select an opponent with options to have them scale to your level or not. Good if you just want to fight and not deal with quests. You can also access Your Citadel if your current character is parked in Bartonia or another city you own, and you can access the Shop even if you're not in a city. You can also jump into Quest mode here or create a new hero or delete your current one. Or select another hero if you've made several.

Multiplayer
You can either play a versus match against another player either through LAN or over the Internet, but there is no server. Instead, you connect to each other through IP. As far as I know, the same rules apply as in Single Player.

Settings
Change resolution, sound/music volume, enable or disable the hint arrow.

Scores
The game keeps track of the highest scores won by all of your characters in Single Player with a second button for Multiplayer bouts.

Minigames are handled from Your Citadel, and all of them are unlocked by spending Gold initially at Bartonia. For the facilities:

Dungeon
When you beat an opponent three times, the fourth time you face them gives you the opportunity to Capture them. This involves a partially-filled board where you're the only person present, and your objective is to match gems until these all disappear with zero left over. So, it's sort of like a puzzle mode with no limits on moves. Win, and you capture the opponent, but you can't do anything until you build the next two facilities.

Mage Tower
You can attempt to learn spells that your captives know. You're given an 8x8 board and have to match a requested number of Mana gems and new Scroll gems. Like Capture, you play alone here, and you can't use any spells or equipment effects. Win, and you learn a higher-cost version of their spell. You can equip your character with six spells regardless of being naturally learned or through the Mage Tower.

Stables
Some enemies you capture instead can be ridden. Mounts give you a bonus to one of your skills and grant you a seventh spell. Once you have a mount, you can use the Train Mount feature to make them stronger. You engage your mount in a battle with a time limit on your moves, and every battle you win makes them higher level in the next fight and reduces your timer. Leveling up your mount allows you to Avoid battles on the Quest world map, skipping the battle and removing the enemy icon from the map.

Forge
This causes Runekeepers to spawn in various places all over the Quest world map. Runekeepers can be nearly any type of regular enemy, but they always have two items: Runekeeper's Key which grants them +5 to all Mana when matching four or five in a row and Runekeeper's Tome which gives a 50% damage bonus for every full Mana reserve. So, if they're allowed to max out Mana, they can very quickly start taking big chunks of life with each Skull match. Runekeepers don't scale to your level, but some may be stronger or weaker than other enemies in their area.

Beating Runekeepers gives you a Rune of one of three types: Base Runes give one effect and determine if the item you make is a helmet, weapon, armor, or accessory. Power Runes give another effect. Modifier Runes impact the effects of the previous two. With one of each Rune, you can make your own items from these effects. Each combination is given a difficulty rating, and the minigame is like learning spells in the Mage Tower. This time, there is a special Hammer and Anvil gem you must match or destroy to meet a quota before you run out of moves.

Siege Workshop
When this is built, you can attempt to capture cities on the Quest world map. Citadels have their own set of equipment and various skills to make your one-person siege difficult, but victory allows you to access Your Citadel from that town, and you can earn tribute Gold every month just for passing through. There's a chance that the captured city will rebel and prevent you tribute on top of not allowing you to take quests or shop there! You'll have to recapture the city if that happens. Towers lower the chance of a city rebelling while the Vault increases tribute Gold received.

The other facilities don't have minigames attached. One merely gives you an instant +5 to Morale while the other lets you spend increasing amounts of Gold to permanently increase your skills.

Okay, so for classes...

Every class naturally learns 14 spells just for leveling up, though the rate you learn slows the higher level you go. Every class also has seven skills based on the non-wildcard gem types on the board. Every class starts with some points in a couple of skills, but when you level up, you're given four points to allocate between these seven skills. How many points are consumed to raise the skill one level depends on what class you're using. A Druid for example takes three points to raise Battle by one while a Warrior raises it with just one point.

Every Skill grants a percent chance of an extra turn plus another chance of spawning a wildcard gem when matching its gem type. So, it's like getting the effects of fours or fives when matching just threes. Elemental Mastery increases Mana earned for making matches plus boosts starting/maximum Mana and grants extra turns with that color; Battle increases damage done and gives extra turns with Skulls; Cunning boosts wildcard multipliers, EXP/Gold won from winning battles, determines who goes first in battle, and gives extra turns from Gold; Morale increases maximum health and grants spell resistance while giving extra turns for matching Purple Stars.

Microtransactions/Add-On Content

There were no microtransactions, but there was one expansion in Revenge of the Plague Lord that happens after the events of the main story, and The Legend Returns rerelease added Attack of the Golem Lord, too. Each expansion adds playable classes, new equipment, new story content, and new monsters to fight.

How I Played

I played this in the past but decided to start anew this time. I initially rolled an Elementalist, but wound up making a Knight just like my very first character way back on the Nintendo DS. Her name was Delphine, and I guess Super Mario Sunshine may have had a little bit of influence on the name. Just maybe. I put every level up point into Morale and Battle, keeping them even. I knew about enemy resists being a problem in the last parts of the game, so I decided I'd focus on Battle to do as much damage as possible with Skulls and Morale to stay alive longer. I still did use spells, but they weren't the focus of my build.

I invested a bunch of money in the Temple to raise my Air Mastery since I was going to use Holy Lance to build up damage, but I didn't stick with it. I kept the Griffon even after dropping the Griffon Shield (+3 damage when dealing 3 or more damage when mount is Griffon) since my runed gear did as good or better.

There were several times in battle where I would avoid making a match that would give the enemy a big advantage, but then the enemy would also try not to match it until it was the last option. I sometimes ate the health loss for not making a valid match just to keep the enemy from it!

I skipped a lot of sidequests and honestly groaned when I got to the 'find the seven pieces of this god' part of the main quest, but I for some reason battled every Runekeeper I could. I eventually made three items and used them for the last couple of days of play. In total, my runed gear allowed me +3 all Mana when matching fours or fives, boosted damage by 3 for every full Mana reserve, did +5 extra damage, gave 30% of inflicting Disease (reduce enemy Mana reserves by 1 on their turn) and two instances of 30% Poison (-1HP per turn), and I used a Prismatic Armor bought from the shop (percent chance per point of collected Mana to increase spell resistance of that color by 2%). So, I'd be a pseudo-Runekeeper and start blasting holes in my enemy after enough fours and fives, and I'd passively shut down their spells in the process. It mostly worked! My career ended at 236 battles with 215 victories.

Controls

Outside of using the keyboard to name your character, the only key that does anything after that is Escape to bring up the Resume/Settings/Exit menu. Everything else is controlled with the mouse. You click on destinations on the Quest world map to travel there, you click on buttons when prompted, you click on one gem then another to swap or click-and-drag. You can mouseover equipment and spells to get description popups, and you can click on your own spells to cast them when ready.

I don't think this version has controller support outside of Steam Input.

I didn't have a problem with controls other than the mouse wheel locking the game up sometimes. Clicking and dragging on the sidebar to scroll instead wasn't that bad, I guess.

Difficulty

There are three difficulty levels you can set from the Single Player menu, but I don't know if they impact enemy stats and/or their AI. Easy reduces EXP rewards by 25% while Hard gives a bonus of 25%.

Normal difficulty is hard to get a bead on in terms of challenge of there being so much variation between the enemy's stats and spells and gear and your own stats and spells and gear. The game mostly follows a linear difficulty curve, but some of the bosses are pretty big spikes, and the new Golem enemies are incredibly hard for how early you fight them. Enemies largely will cast spells when able and when it'll benefit them, go for fours and fives if they're on the board, and match Skulls if they can. I did notice a few times when enemies did not match a four/five, so I don't know if there's some handicap function where they 'can't see' these or what. I know when this game was popular, other players complained about the AI cheating by knowing what gems would fall in from above, but I didn't really get that feeling here. It sucks to take a ton of damage on an enemy's first turn or after a Mana Drain, but RNG is gonna RNG.

Special mention goes to the Bard for their very first skill. If the enemy has little to no Air/Water Resistance, you can do something hilarious (if time-consuming) straight out of Morrowind:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=337204410
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=344834834

When your health runs out, you're defeated. You're still given some EXP and Gold, but death is a slap on the wrist. There's one quest near the start of the game where only the next immediate scene changes slightly if you win or lose, but there's no consequence in the end. Losing against a quest monster has a popup telling you to try again. In minigames, running out of moves or not clearing the board in Capture also prompts you to try again from the beginning.

Saving

Every character has their own save slot, but there is only automatic saving after every battle or when you quit the game. The only way the game doesn't save is if you crash somehow.

Graphics and Performance

The quest world map has this hand-painted look to it. You and enemies are shown as sprites, and enemy sprites 'inflate and deflate' while you march in place. Your mount is even shown, so that's a cute detail. The world map populates with places you can visit as you complete quests, and quests themselves are shown as red exclamation points for main story or green for sidequests. If you see a black exclamation point, it's a quest you're too underleveled to accept.

The 8x8 board dominates the battle screen. Your character is on the left with the opponent on the right. There's a green icon at the top of your side when it's your turn and a red icon when it's the enemy's, and your selection circles are the same colors, too! When you match gems, there's a text popup in the color matching the gem indicating what effect it had. The text here and when you get extra turns from fours and fives and Heroic Efforts are in Impact font. But battles are pretty low on special effects. Gems slide and fall, there are lightning bolt effects when Skulls match, equipment effects that kick in have their slot on the equipment panel blaze up in embers for a moment. It's not very flashy, but there's nothing wrong with simplicity.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3356566126
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3362449041

The battle UI is mostly easy to read if not overwhelming at first. The red bar at the top is health, your character icon is under it with four bars for each of the Mana colors. There is no indication how much Mana each bar needs to be full other than its size relative to the other bars. There's a gold coins icon for Gold and a Purple Star icon for EXP. Then there's a box with your helmet, armor, weapon, and accessory. The four shields are your Spell Resistance. And the six boxes below that are your assigned spells with the seventh showing up if you're on a mount. The same applies to the enemy, but they don't get mounts.

I had some issues with the visuals, one of which might show up in the videos (the Skull lightning glitching out), and I'll share another in a bit. In terms of performance, the Deck had no complaints with this one, but like...it was designed for low-spec computers in the Windows XP era!

Audio

There is a small amount of voiced content in this game. There is a male narrator at the start of the game and after certain bosses and a female voice indicating if you're near death, if you've won/lost, if your character has learned a new spell, and pointing out your Heroic Effort. If there's anything more, it's in skill activation effects.

There are a few songs in the game. They're made of instruments you might expect from a medieval world, so chimes, woodwinds, strings, horns, drums, chanting, that sorta thing. Not a full orchestra, so most songs are pretty...light? I dunno. The random battle themes are not energetic or high-tempo at all. There are some themes for battle, one theme for exploring the world map, some characters and events have their own theme, and there's a theme for fighting boss characters that's a remix of the title theme. Then there's a theme for when you have the enemy under 25% health and one when you're under 25%. Here's the soundtrack link.

Stability, Glitches, and Other Weirdness

I had a couple of things come up. You might have seen the lightning bolt glitch in an earlier video, but look at this one:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3356566128

I dunno what causes it, but this only really shows up on the Choose Opponent window.

I mentioned the scroll wheel locking up the game. Annoying, but you can work around it.

Also, this and Doom 3 were the first games where I tried the Background Recording feature on the Steam Deck, and for some reason, the Deck completely restarted when trying to boot up the game this way a couple of times. It happened once in Doom 3 too, but I never figured out what caused it here nor there.

Other than those, I didn't see anything really weird happen.

Replay Value

There is a ton in this one. I mean, consider what it'd take to really 100% the game: You'd have to beat the main game and both expansions' content, you'd have to get max level (50 in this version since it's based on the original PC release, 60 in the X360/iOS?/Switch versions), you'd have to capture every enemy and learn their spells, you'd have to train mounts to...what, level 50/60? Conquer every city on the world map, have all of the Shop gear and quest gear where possible. And that's just for one character! There are 13 classes!

But yeah, 100%ing aside, there's a lot to do here, and you can probably play this for hundreds of hours if you really were into match-3 gameplay. Even if you for some reason have no interest in playing Quest mode, you can probably keep beating up on monsters in Single Player for a while.

What Worked For Me

Endless options
Even in the base game, there are four classes that you can tailor any way you'd like. You can't learn absolutely every spell in the game, but your starting class still offers a pretty good selection. There are a lot of equipment and spell options and combinations you can make from those, so you're sure to find something that really clicks with you in terms of playstyle.

Surprising amount of content
Options for builds aside, there are a lot of quests to undertake and quite a few different kinds of enemies to fight. And even beelining the main quest will take a while. The game probably still would have done as well as it did if it had a short, five-hour main quest and then let you faff about in Instant Action then on, but there's a surprisingly long RPG under the match-3 gameplay!

What I Didn't Like

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
The Shop randomly offers its wares. Internally, every item in the game has a value between 0 and 8 with 0 being enemy-only equipment or quest rewards and 8 being very common, and every item in the game has one of these nine numbers attached. So, some gear is common, some is rare, several can't ever show up in the Shop at all. It's kind of annoying to hunt down a specific piece because the Shop may not have it at the time, so you have to get into a fight or minigame I think to get the Shop to refresh, and you're still not guaranteed you'll see that item you want. At least if you're away from a town, you can quit to the main menu, go to Single Player, and access the Shop.

Swingtown
I didn't like the extra turn/wildcard spawn feature of skills. The extra turns could screw up predictability, which I know is kind of a lost point in a game with a random number generator involved. There was one time the enemy got three of these turns in a row!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3361320397

You of course get these extra turns too, but you can't rely on them to happen when you need them or you might have them happen when you can't make use of them, and so on. Wildcards almost always benefited the other side due to them appearing after your turn ends, so it just seemed like a poor feature to me.

For Endless Fight
I guess the reason that there's a surprisngly long RPG under the match-3 gameplay is due to battles taking a few minutes each. I know there are some instant-kill builds out there, but even for someone who put a lot of points in Battle and used damage gear, I still had battles that took a while because of admittedly poor play or lack of Skulls or whatever. This doesn't even cover some of the enemies you can fight that can repeatedly heal themselves. Ugh.

Leap of faith
There are some quests where you can take one option or another, but you don't get to see the effects of your choice until you make it. For example, one quest has Khalkus send you after a stolen Dwarven relic. You beat the baddie who has it, but you can either return it or keep it for yourself...but the prompts only say as much, and when you receive your reward, it's too late to reload and check the other option before deciding.

Verdict - 3/5

I recommend this one even if I didn't have fun. I don't think there's really anything seriously wrong with the game despite my complaints above, just it wasn't the right fit for me. I know I played it a bunch on the Nintendo DS around when it came out, but I didn't have that enthusiasm this time around. Maybe it's better as a 'I've five minutes to kill' game when you're out and about instead of sitting down and trying to put a couple of hours in it at a time. Maybe it was just my build that didn't get me going. I dunno!

It's worth a try. And I'm still kind of interested in giving a serious try to the other games in the series: Galactrix, Puzzle Quest 2, and partially-related Puzzle Kingdoms since I have those on Steam already. And maybe Puzzle Chronicles which I don't. I've already played Gems of War for a while, and I'm not sure about Puzzle Quest 3...

little advice

If you play with the hint arrow on, read ahead to see how the board will look after your move. The arrow only points out valid matches, not what actually benefits you!