magerette
Hedgewitch
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- October 18, 2006
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Gamespot is much less taken with Infinitive Interactive's recent entry in the Puzzle Quest series, Galactrix,than most of the reviews we've seen so far, scoring the game as 'mediocre' at 5.5/10:
Conclusion:Like its predecessor, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is a role-playing game of sorts in which turn-based battles play out on something resembling a Bejeweled board. Galactrix takes Puzzle Quest out of its original fantasy setting into the realm of sci-fi and, at first glance, it appears to retain and improve on much of what made the first game great. The new hexagonal playing field with variable gravity initially feel like an exciting innovation, but ultimately they're the game's undoing because blind luck now plays much too big a part in determining the outcome of almost every encounter...
...When you're not doing battle against space pirates or any of the other factions that inhabit the Galactrix universe, you're using the same hexagonal playing field to unlock leapgates between solar systems, as well as crafting items, mining asteroids, and even haggling with shopkeepers. In short, you spend almost all of your time doing the same thing. Every activity has its own set of rules...but they all feel very similar, and most suffer from the same dependence on luck that the battles do.
The lack of gameplay variety would be easier to stomach if there was a compelling story to justify the time that you spend navigating the huge galactic map and doing battle with most of the races that you encounter, but you won't find one here.
More information.Puzzle Quest: Galactrix should have been every bit as special as its predecessor, but whereas that game's randomness was only a mild irritation when it worked against you, here it ruins the game regardless of whether or not you're losing. It's true that not every battle is decided on luck, but enough of them are that frustration will set in before you're even close to investing the tens of hours that it takes to get through the story.
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