Push Button B

Game: PuzzleQuest: Galactrix
Purchased from: Best Buy
Price paid: $5.99
Platform: PC

It’s no great secret that I like puzzle games. But it’s also no great secret that I’m not a huge fan of the Bejeweled-type games. So why did I pick up a game that looks like it’s Bejeweled in space?

Because I had $6 burning a hole in my pocket, duh.

PuzzleQuest presents you with a series of hexagonal grids where you (and optionally a computer opponent) swap tiles and try to match three or more in a row (no big surprise there).

And your goals will vary from trying to destroy your opponent’s ship to ‘hacking’ (which is a fancy way of saying you have to make a certain sequence of clears in a restricted time limit) to ‘mining’ (which is a fancy way of saying that you have to match colors while working around garbage blocks that don’t actually do much). These are all wrapped with a story mode that’s conveyed with static pictures where the portraits talk to each other. Fire Emblem-style.

And I’d really like to tell you more about this game, like how deep and engrossing the story is, how the dialog is punchy with deep and pertinent undertones, how long the game is, all that kind of stuff.

But I can’t.

Mostly because the game would crash after about 20 minutes of me playing it for no discernible reason (thankfully, the autosave worked). I know, poor me, right?

But there was hope to be found!

I checked out the site of the publisher, Aspyr, and found that they had released a patch that, among other things:

“Fixed a bug that caused random crashes/performance issues on certain computers.”

Which I downloaded and installed, only to find that the patch couldn’t find the game installed on my system. It just throws up its virtual hands and gives up.

So I guess that makes this a pretty good game to pick up and play for about 20 minutes or so at a time because that’s as long as it’ll stay running, but that’s hardly a glowing review. But I will say that I don’t really miss my six bucks.

That makes it better, right?