When you return to your home castle after earning enough gold, you can go to your citadel and spend your hard-earned gold pieces to open the game even further. Each of the upgrades you can make to your citadel allows you to do a little more within the game. Players with a fully built citadel will be able to capture enemies and learn their spells, take over other cities for gold, create your own weapons and armor, and train large creatures to carry you around and assist in battle.
After you have built a dungeon within your citadel, you have the ability to capture enemies you have defeated at least three times. Upon running into them for the fourth time, you will have the option to either fight them again, or capture them. 'Capture' opens a slick mini-game where the object is not to drain your enemy's life, but to clear all the gems on the board. The puzzles get more difficult as the game moves along, sometimes causing you to retry the puzzle a handful of times before finally taking out the spheres in the right order. Once captured, a quick trip to your citadel will allow gamers to enter a mini-game to learn spells from the enemies they have caught. Gamers must create scrolls by matching four, or more, items together, then match enough scrolls to learn the spell.
Should you capture a giant rat or bird and have a stable in your citadel, you will have the ability to level up your 'mount', as the captured monster will now serve as your transportation and helper in battle. Leveling up your mounts plays similarly to the online multiplayer, as players have a time limit for each move they make, and must defeat the enemy to level up. Although each city has a shop for you to purchase new armor and weapons, the most useful item in your citadel might be the forge. Gamers have the ability to search the waypoints between castles for 'runes', won by defeating difficult 'rune keepers', which can then be combined at the forge to make new items. The forge mini-game forces gamers to get a certain amount of each colored mana and anvils (created with each four-sphere match), before the board runs out of available moves and the game ends.
In addition to everything else the game offers, it also adds the ability to challenge friends at home and strangers to do battle over Xbox Live. Those worried that they will get their brains beaten in by those too addicted to the game to stop playing can relax. The game wisely allows you to select a level-cap for those you challenge, and even scales the characters to create a level playing field. Online play is as smooth as the campaign, with the added tension of the ever-ticking move clock; which can be only as high as 16-seconds. Should the movement clock tick down to zero before you are able to make a move, you lose your turn and get zapped for five life points.
The 360's controller becomes an issue from time to time, occasionally sending a sphere the wrong direction if you slightly angle your move in error. For the most part, the controller works just fine, but loosing a battle over a late-round misstep is annoying. The game looks about the same as on the PSP, which is to say good but not great. Still, the many gameplay charms more than make up for the ordinary visuals. Sonically, the game gets a fantastic sweeping action-adventure score that seems to swell at just the right moments during battle. This and the triumphant British accented, "You're victorious", make this one of the best sounding games on the Arcade.
Puzzle Quest reinvents the puzzle genre with its unique RPG laden gameplay. It is the kind of game that will need its own support group to assist all the addicted in the near future. While many a gamer likes to complain about Live Arcade's pricing strategy, at 1200 points, Puzzle Quest still feels like a bargain. With over 150 quests, slick online multiplayer battles, incredibly deep and addictive gameplay, and whispers of possible downloadable content, you are unlikely to find someone who has purchased the game with any complaints.
