I’ll start with a confession. I don’t tend to like your average RPG. As often heralded as they may be, I just can’t quite bring myself to tolerate yet another clichéd fantasy hero going on yet another clichéd quest; all the while, having the clichéd experience of a lifetime!

I often feel RPGs are more anime than game. This is not a knock at anime. It’s a knock at RPGs for tending to not be as interactive as I feel they should be. Before you complain, I fully concede that there are many great RPGs out there. It’s just yet another genre plagued with oversaturation, as well as not quite being my cup of tea to begin with.

All of that said, while standard RPGs may cause me to shy away, hybrid RPGs (games that combine a genre or genres with RPG elements) can really get me excited. The Boktai series, strategy RPGs, the later Castlevania games-these are all hybrid RPGs that I have a lot of fun with. The list goes on. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords has deservingly added itself to this list.

When I first heard of Puzzle Quest I was quite wary. It’s basically an RPG with gameplay mostly based around a competitive version of the well-known casual puzzle game Bejeweled. In the past, Bejeweled proved itself to be a bit too simplistic for my taste but was just on the border of addictive and fun.

Puzzle Quest puts Bejeweled’s gameplay mechanics well over that border into very addictive and very fun territory. Puzzle Quest’s addition to the gameplay mechanics includes heroes of differing classes, spells, items, mounts, companions and RPG stats with leveling. There’s even multiplayer support via LAN or over the internet using IP addresses.

There’s additional gameplay outside of the gem-matching puzzle battles. You navigate a map visiting various kingdoms, accepting quests, even sieging, running and building your own citadels. Once citadels are properly built up, you can visit them to solve puzzles and pay gold to train your hero.

The citadel puzzles forge items, train captured mounts and teach you spells from captured enemies. Anyone familiar with the Heroes of Might and Magic series will see a lot of similarities in Puzzle Quest. Replace HoMM’s strategic war battles with Puzzle Quest’s puzzle battles and you have a game strikingly similar to Puzzle Quest.

The storyline of the game is a bit hackneyed, as one might fear, but its still fairly well done and interesting. It never gets in the way of the core gameplay and only enhances it. The graphics are well-done with a nice anime style. This style is carried throughout the entire game from the characters to the monsters and locations you visit.

Even the music and sounds are quite well done and fit the games epic fantasy atmosphere well. These are all areas that the developers could have easily slacked on, making the game more of a puzzler with RPG aspects, but they chose to make a full-blown RPG with prominent puzzle gameplay-a daring and definitely successful endeavor. While the gameplay is fairly repetitive there seems to always be a way to switch things up a bit.

Puzzle Quest has been ported to several consoles. I’m personally familiar with the PC and Nintendo DS versions. I’d recommend avoiding the handheld versions. The PSP version has an unfortunate bug rendering companions moot and the NDS version is rather unbalanced.

The presence of cheating AI is questionable in all versions. If it does cheat, I don’t feel it to be very noticeable or a major problem for that matter (at least in the PC version). All things considered, my advice is to grab yourself a patchable version (PC or Xbox 360) just to be safe.

While the PC version is moddable, the Xbox 360 will be receiving a purchasable expansion pack subtitled Revenge of the Plague Lord that has yet to be announced for any other system. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is a great game considering the overall quality and is surprisingly deep for a puzzle game. The relatively low price point doesn’t hurt either.