Puzzle Kingdoms is the kind of game that has some strong foundations, with addictive gameplay and some great art and music to go along with its lighthearted story. For a budget title, it really has a lot to offer; even if one discounts the lengthy campaign, it's still a solid puzzle game and a worthy time-killer. The basic match three gameplay gets a change-up from the Bejeweled worship of Puzzle Quest, with players pushing rows of blocks around to form matches, but the idea remains very similar in that you must build up mana by matching those blocks, in order to attack enemies with a variety of spells. A troop management system also fleshes things out by allowing players a variety of options in approaching fights - one can focus on direct damage, small, frequent attacks, big "nukes", status effects, and so on.
However, everything good about the game is undermined by the fact that the designers were apparently more concerned with griefing their customers than actually making something fun to play. These problems are both structural and related to the AI. While in the early stages, Puzzle Kingdoms is fair in its challenge, this quickly ramps up to ludicrous heights. This happens in Puzzle Quest as well, but at least in Puzzle Quest, one could simply try battles repeatedly until victory, grinding for more experience to get that next killer spell. In Kingdoms, however, players are trapped in "kingdom" zones, where they have limited finances, troops and so on at their disposal. This effectively means in the late game that every single loss is devastating, as the money can't be won back - there's no repeatable quests to help you get back on your feet after a crushing defeat. Oh, and the only way to save is to quit the game, which means you'll be endlessly reloading and restarting, often dozens of times in a row for more challenging enemies, with no gain and no way to back off and rethink your strategy since once you enter a kingdom, you're locked in until the end. Brilliant!
If all this wasn't enough to make the game annoying, Infinite Interactive took it a step farther and kept the absurdly difficult and downright cheating AI from Puzzle Quest intact. While this was countered somewhat in Puzzle Quest by the fact that you could always out-grind any opponent, in Puzzle Kingdoms, there's no such compensation, and the AI is free to pummel you with endless combos, owing to the fact that it can see - and probably manipulate - all of the pieces sitting above the visible field of play. Even this wouldn't be such a problem, if it weren't for the fact that later in the game, the placement of blocks ends up being rigged by the computer too - rather than setting up your own attacks, the game simply becomes an endurance contest as you survive long enough for the "random" number gods to bestow enough mana on you to cast a spell or attack. In the worst situations, going for the types of mana you need to win will actually result in you setting up the AI for even bigger combos, with no way of actually seeing it in advance. This isn't just bad design, it's an example of the designers being downright malicious.
I can't at all recommend Puzzle Kingdoms. Everything about it artistically and functionally is solid, and it looks like an enjoyable game to the uninitiated, but it simply becomes too frustrating, random and luck-driven in the end to really be worthy of its "puzzle" monicker, as the computer is able to thwart every single attempt you try to put past it. I appreciate challenge in games, but Puzzle Kingdoms would rather load its dice than put up a fair fight.
