Game Review - Puzzle Quest 2

Game Review - Puzzle Quest 2

Score +4/-6

Overview
Puzzle Quest 2 is a fantasy role-playing game (although with minimal actual role-playing) that uses various match-3 style games for various actions such as combat, picking locks, and searching for treasure.
+ The artwork is very nice, if simple. The presentation makes up for the lack of any real 3D animation, but the lack thereof also makes it surprisingly light on system requirements.
+ The system for upgrading gear takes some of the chanciness of buying stuff out of the game and at the same time puts some control in the hands of the player.
+ Interesting minigames for various tasks.
+ A lot of teleporters to short-cut the tediousness of travel. It would be even better if you could click a teleporter on the map instead of trying to remember which room is called what and where it is.
- Linear and predictable story.
- Many types of equipment, but it is only cosmetic.
- You are locked into your stat allocation until level 20, and then you have to pay to change it. Level 20 is a long way to go, and in the meantime you have very little guidance on what a useful allocation is. Some online forums recommend you homogenize stats or recommend a mix that is independent of your character -- which in turns suggests really samey gameplay no matter what character you have.
- Too few spells can be accessed active at any one time.
- Some of the spells, especially higher-level ones, are not necessarily useful. Some of the spells the can be learned or acquired from party members are not particularly useful. In the case of the learned spells, they have  very little return for your time investment (unless you look for a spell solution walkthrough online to quickly win the minigames).
- Incredibly tedious gameplay. Although you can skip some fights, there are still a lot of them, and the game is sufficiently hard that even if you got satisfaction from winning fights, after a while things will start to grind, especially when the enemies on each level are repeated a lot.
- Enemies level up with you, making level progression somewhat meaningless or even penalizing: There is, however, a level cap on enemies, which is good in that they stop matching you in challenge, but bad in that there's very little return on your time. You can easily mod the game yourself to change levels and monster stats. Enemies also fall off the quick battles list as you level up -- you can mod them back in.

Modding Puzzle Quest 2 - Quick Battle Monster List

The enemies available for Quick Battles in Puzzle Quest 2 depend on your character's level. As you level up, lower-level enemies drop off the list, probably because you don't earn much experience for it. However, you may actually want to do this to just harvest resources easily and not inflate your level (which causes enemies to level up in the campaign).
This post will brief you on how to change this.

General Modding
The basics of modding Puzzle Quest 2 is to unzip the Assets.zip file, change what you want, then zip it back up. The trick is in finding where to make the changes.

Monster List for Quick Battles
The game uses two separate lists, and omits certain special enemies, such as bosses you haven't encountered in the game (thus protecting you from SPOILERS). To simplify things and include the omissions, you can modify two files.

Part 1
First, look at ..\Assets\Scripts\Monsters\Monsters.lua and go to the end of the file to find function GetListOfMonsters(referenceHero, quickBattle).

It contains a big IF-ELSE-END block. You can just delete it (make a backup of this file first!) and replace it with...

for _, monster in ipairs(monsters) do
  local data = MONSTERS[monster]
  if data then
    table.insert(monsterCandidates, monster)
  end
end

What this does is force the script to just grab all the monsters in the file ..\Assets\Scripts\Monsters\MonstersList.lua, regardless of whether the creature is a boss and regardless of its level.

Part 2
After you have made the change and saved it, open ..\Assets\Scripts\Monsters\MonstersList.lua. Notice that some entries are commented out with a "--" in front of it. To make those entries valid again, remove the "--". Some entries like "Fire" CAN be put back, but it really makes no sense. You do not play the putting-out-a-fire challenge. Instead, it is treated as a creature. Looks harmless to do this, however.

Modding Puzzle Quest 2

If you find Puzzle Quest 2 combat too hard and/or tedious, or if you have built your character the wrong way and don't want to replay from scratch, you can mod/cheat grotesquely to save some time.

General Modding
The basics of modding Puzzle Quest 2 is to unzip the Assets.zip file, change what you want, then zip it back up. The trick is in finding where to make the changes.

Monster Level
Monsters have a minimum and maximum level, and in general level up with you whenever possible, with a slight random factor variance. To change this, find the text file ..\Assets\Scripts\Monsters\Monsters.lua
The function SelectMonsterLevel calculates and returns the monster level. The final line (return monsterLevel) is all you need to change.

To make all monsters be at their minimum allowed level all the time, change this line to return def.minLevel.

To make all monsters level 1 all the time, change this line to return 1.


Monster Hit Points
Hit points are calculated in lines 257 to 269 in the text file ..\Assets\Scripts\Monsters\Monsters.lua. Monsters have a base Hit Point total and additional Hit Points per level.

To set all monsters to 1 Hit Point, change...

• line 258 from hit_points_per_level = def.hitPointsPerLevel, to hit_points_per_level = 0, (remember the comma at the end)
• line 260 from health = def.baseHitPoints, to health = 1,

Monster Move Intelligence

How cleverly monsters choose moves is calculated by the function RefreshMoveIntelligence on lines 40-57. in the text file ..\Assets\Scripts\Monsters\Monsters.lua. The key lines are at 48-54. You can theoretically make Easy even easier by changing the constants there. For example, you can change line 49 from move_intelligence = (monsterMoveIntelligence * 5) + 5 to move_intelligence = (monsterMoveIntelligence * 10) + 10