Gamer reviews for Puzzle Craft 2

Connect the Crops

I haven’t played the first Puzzle Craft title so everything I experienced in Puzzle Craft 2 is new to me. Puzzle Craft 2 is a combination of city-building and Match3 puzzling, wherein the puzzle-solving part produces the resources needed for your city building. The game fits a perfect balance between resource management and puzzle solving. The puzzles give you a little bit of control and fun to what could have been a brain-dead activity that we usually get from the resource management / city-building games.

Puzzle Craft 2 is for free but with lots of in-app purchase options ranging from $1.99 - $99.99. There is also a randomly generated resource giveaway if you watch 30 seconds worth of video ads. These video ads are mostly other games and apps, and also are surprisingly interesting. You can also exchange the in-game gold coins for some valuable resources. There are lots of other avenues if you want extra assets.

Basically, you gather raw materials from three different fields (farm, mine, ocean). You must connect three or more tiles of the same item on a 5x5 board for you to “harvest” these resources. There are instances that you can harvest different kinds of items by linking them with compatible ones. For example, you can harvest “corn” with “grass”, however, linking them will not net you a bonus “bird” tile that will naturally occur when chaining long lines of “corn”. These raw materials are not readily consumed as soon as you harvest them, there is a needed quantity for these raw materials to become useful. In order to make the resource “bread”, you must have an X amount of harvested raw material “grain”. These requirements go down as you progress because you can either hire workers or build structures that reduce the requirements, or provide free moves, among other bonuses that directly affects yields or instances.

The vast array of raw materials are not given to you outright. You have to discover them first, and then research them in order to further improve them. The discovering part is not really “discovery” as you can see in the puzzle tile menu the percentage of completion of the discovery of the next raw material. If it hits 100%, the next time you visit a puzzle board the new raw material shall appear. After discovering them you have to pay resources to "unlock" them. After you unlock them, you have to gather enough amounts in order for your workers to "research" it. When research is complete, you can gain access to yield bonuses of the researched raw materials.

There is no straightforward hierarchy for these raw materials. Just because it is the latest crop you discovered, does not automatically mean it is the best. Each and every raw material has advantages and disadvantages, making them all equal. For example, “oak” takes fewer amounts to become logs, while the “birch” demands a lot more. The “birch” however offers more “birds” because they do not require long links in order to qualify for the bonus “bird” tile.

The city-building part of Puzzle Craft 2 is mostly done in a campaign kind of way. First you settle on a small area by the seashore and you slowly expand. You basically have to go back to zero everytime you establish new settlements, however, you have more building options, more sources of gold coins (the previous areas will pay you taxes every X amount of time), familiarity and expertise of the puzzles, as well as more building options.

Buildings are unlocked when you hit certain levels. There are only two ways of gaining levels, one is playing the puzzles, and the other one is completing the challenges. You can only have two challenges at a time, and if you have a hard time completing them, you can trade in your runes for a new set. You can also increase the number of challenges by paying real money. Purchasing more challenges is a nice bonus. If you are ever going to spend money in this game, increase the challenge numbers because the rewards are enormous and the challenges are usually very easy to complete. There are also quests and completing them will improve your influence. Influence are used for decorations (not really necessary) and buying tools in the Magic Portal (very handy).

Gameplay is just too broad for me to cover in this review. I have to stop discussing it since it will be better if you read the guide (will follow shortly) if you are interested to know more about it. To cut things short, the gameplay is addictive and fun enough for you to stick around until you build your castle.

The graphics are colorful, though the art direction is on the less impressive side. They are not horrible to look at, but your eyes won't be pleasured with the visuals. Graphics could be better though. The music gets repetitive quick, but the sound effects are wonderful. You can set the background music off, and just turn on the sound effects. You can also have the option of disabling both and listen to your favorite music while building your civilization.

You can progress far into the game without paying a cent, but it would be nice to buy some runes in order to quickly unlock the raw materials. Or just listen to my good advice by buying the extra challenges package as they are the most useful bonus (priced at $5.99 as of this writing). If you are looking for an in-depth resource management and challenging puzzles, look elsewhere, Puzzle Craft 2 does not offer those, but it offers a perfect combination of both.