It's out on the manly-man platform, I bet it flunked cert and will be delayed on the consoles because of that.
Galactrix doesn't suck, though. I agree that it's not as good as the original Puzzle Quest, that's a fair thing to say. It's a Puzzle Quest game where they tried some different things and just didn't spend enough time polishing the mechanics enough.
For example, the better AI and increased randomness in the first Puzzle Quest forced players to work harder at their spells and item layouts to beat fights than you have to do in Galactrix. The mini games in the first Puzzle Quest were also a bit more engaging and definitely far less tedious-some of the fixed puzzle challenges (gone in Galactrix) offered a real spatial teasing, where Galactrix never really hits that mark with all of its puzzles randomized. Oh, and hacking FUCKING SUCKS and would have caused me to shelf the game halfway in if I couldn't mod it out on the PC version and you'll succcessfully mine an asteroid about once every 50 times, making mining incredibly slow and tedious. Rewards in the game are mind-boggling-beat a ship and you get maybe 30-50 EXP, do a minigame that requires no item preparation or gearing level for the same period of time,get 500 EXP. Stats lack the oomph effect in Galactrix they had in PQ because they are intentionally muted so that players can swap out what they want to specialize in via ship selection, which also doesn't feel as rewarding as PQ's system was.
The core match-3 gameplay is fine, though. It's better than PQ because it's smarter and the head-to-head combat is as much about matching skills and power management than it is just item abuse combos. It's just a shame that most of the elements outside of the core match 3 seem underdone. I don't agree with the content of Gamespot's 5.5 review-if anything, the game is vastly easier than PQ-but 3/5 stars or so would be about the meaningless score that I would give this game.
I did a mini-review on the borecast this week. If you can get past the fact that listening to old PC gamers is the equivalent of listening to Jigglypuff, you might dig that segment.
