With how ubiquitous the Match-3 genre is these days, it's kind of hard to remember a time before Puzzle Quest. Casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma were able to capture a major underserved audience and there had been previous attempts to add story lines to arcade puzzlers with varying success. Puzzle Quest kinda blew the doors off of the whole thing though. I don't think anyone expected it to be even 10 percent as successful as it ended up being but something about the familiar Bejeweled gameplay with a more complicated layer on top made everyone go gaga for it. It probably didn't hurt that the Nintendo DS, the first system Puzzle Quest released on, was also a massive, [i]massive[/i] success and had a hugely varied demographic install base. Puzzle Quest overlapped so many of those demographics and its mix of story, RPG mechanics, and puzzle tile matching has continued to be influential since. From the whole "No, no, I swear, I'm just playing it for the articles!" deal of Hunie Pop or the Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion series from last year, they all owes it to Puzzle Quest.
As with anything that has that kind of breakthrough success, copycats immediately sprang up. Just like the the last few years with the endless Vampire Survivor clones coalescing into a new genre, everyone was trying to get a bite of the Puzzle Quest pie. Notable publishers even. Konami had their Puzzle Chronicles game, for example. Then there's [b]Gyromancer.[/b] Somehow, Square Enix teamed up with Pop Cap Games to release [b]Gyromancer[/b] and it's kind of a weird one. It almost seems like the two companies working together started as a joke like the old Archie Meets The Punisher comic book crossover. However, just like that crossover, this game mostly works pretty well. Pop Cap was firing on all cylinders in this era, before EA bought them and everything just... disappeared, so the foundation for [b]Gyromancer[/b] is going to be solid. Essentially, it's their earlier game Bejeweled Twist slapped into a faux medieval RPG coat of paint. You've got the traditional looking Bejeweled board but instead of just swapping two tiles, you rotate a 2x2 square clockwise. A minor difference but it changes how you approach the board greatly.
On these boards, you are competing against an opponent but unlike Puzzle Quest, your opponent isn't twisting the pieces against you. Instead, both the player have meters that rise after each twist the player makes. These meters represent an action that will change a tile on the board to an action piece. If the player has one of these pieces in a match, then it'll set off an action, such as exploding which will remove surrounding tiles, removing all tiles of a certain color, and so forth. This will also send damage to your opponent. Now when the opponent's meter fills, it too changes a piece on the board. These pieces have skulls on them and start to count down like a time bomb. If the player can match these time bombs before the bomb reaches zero, they're gone. However, if you fail to match them, then it sets off an attack that damages the player. Simple concept but if you have played this kind of game before, you can see how complex it can become with combos. Once you get the hang of it, it works pretty well.
Now the other thing is that you go into battle with a roster of monsters. You can take three with you in a roster at one time and each monster has a color affinity, which makes matches of those colors stronger for your meter gain. There's also a rock-paper-scissors thing where different monsters have strengths and weaknesses against monsters of different affinities, like the Pokemon type system. All of these battles are strung together, for lack of a better word, by 11 dungeon maps. These maps consist of paths that you move along, encountering monsters, finding treasure boxes, discovering new monsters for your roster, and removing obstacles to open new paths. Moving around on these maps is incredibly slow and I don't know why they couldn't let you move faster. On the earlier shorter maps, it's not a big deal but a couple of the later ones are much too big. There's also some sort of story going on here but I'm not gonna lie; I just skipped most of them. The characters are generic looking in the story scenes and the whole story felt like an afterthought from the get go so I stopped caring almost immediately.
Despite the map speed and the immaterial story, I ended up playing this for nearly 30 hours. Once I really understood how the rhythms of the puzzle battles worked, I got more than a little hooked on it. I got stuck in the auto repair shop for almost 6 hours last week and thank god I snagged my Deck before going there because playing [b]Gyromancer[/b] made that time just fly by. It's not the most original game and is clearly trying to ride the coattails of a different game but it really worked for me. The various monsters you have available to use each have their own attack styles that change they way you approach your matches and needing to switch around your roster depending on which types are in the map your are tackling really can keep it fresh. One of the monsters is this ant thing and his action gems causes two locked pieces to appear in the same row or column. A locked piece means you can't rotate any square that contains it. The more pieces you match, it will add more locked pieces to the board, limiting your moves. It can cause you to take massive damage from the enemies bombs but when you manage to get a match on those locked pieces, it causes lightning to shoot out, which chains the other locked pieces, just knocking the opponent senseless. It's one of those satisfying things to see and watching the board explode rules.
I'm not gonna say this game is some sort of hidden masterpiece but I enjoyed it a helluva lot more than I expected to. The early game can feel a little overwhelming and confusing, which seems turn off some people based on the reviews I've seen. It probably comes down to expectations. These kinds of puzzle games are usually much more casual and don't expect too much from the player. [b]Gyromancer[/b] isn't all that casual. It has dungeon maps, level grinding, elemental affinities, and roster management. If you're looking for a match-3 with a little more depth and you've already played the more recent ones, this is probably worth a look, at least if you can get it on sale. At the end of the day, it still is a game made by Pop Cap in their prime and even their worst games from that era are gonna have something worthwhile. [b]Gyromancer[/b] is far from "A Day in the Life" but it's no "Mr. Moonlight" either, even if it's essentially a cover song.
