Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition – PS5 Review

Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition is a remake of the original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords.  That game came out in 2007 and had success on quite a few formats (PSP, DS, PS2, Xbox 360) thanks to its clever mix of addictive match-three puzzling and RPG-style mechanics.  It was smarter than your average Bejeweled clone but just as addictive.  There were a few sequels which weren’t quite as good.  From legit sequels that made everything a lot more fussy and complex to licensed versions based on Marvel, Magic the Gathering and even the cartoon series Adventure Time but these were plagued with horrible free-to-play mechanics.

What the series really needed was to return to its roots and that’s what Aussie developers Infinity Plus 2 have done.  Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition is the first game but with the three additional DLC expansions included (and with a brand new character class thrown in).  But to those of you that missed Puzzle Quest the first time around, what is it?

Puzzle Quest sees you picking a character class from the usual RPG archetypes and setting off an expansive adventure to rid the land of evil.  This is done by getting quests from your Queen and others and then embarking on many battles with foes ranging from rats and skeletons to powerful mages and dragons.  It’s pretty much what you’d expect from any RPG with loot to find, spells to learn and secrets to discover.

The difference though is that the battles here are on 8×8 grids where you have to match gems, coins and skulls in groups of three or more in turns against your enemy as they try to do the same.  The same sort of thing as Candy Crush Saga but more of a game and not an evil time-sink.

The gems come in four colours and when you create a match with one of them, you’ll start filling a mana bar of that colour.  So initially you’ll just be stocking up as much mana as you can but once you have enough, you can fire off a spell.  We were playing as a Fire Mage and that meant we wanted lots of red and yellow mana in order to be able to shoot fire attacks at our enemies.  Meanwhile, you’re also trying to match up the colours that need so that they can counter with spells of their own.

You can also attack by matching skulls.  These are more direct attacks and so you’ll be looking to prioritise matching those before your opponent.  Especially ‘Doom Skulls’ as these do a lot more damage.  There are also coins (used to buy items outside of battles) and purple stars (essentially experience to help level you up).  It’s all pretty straightforward stuff and quite intuitive considering that there’s a bit more going on than in the usual casual tile-matching title.

This part of the game is pretty enjoyable apart from one thing which is the suspiciously insane luck the AI seems to get.  It’s easy to just imagine some soft of conspiracy here but the amount of times the AI has benefitted from a ludicrous, and unforeseeable, chain reaction is certainly cause for alarm.  And its usually the more difficult opponents who benefit.  It might just be a little bit of confirmation bias from us but this game has made us say “fuck off, game” more than any other game we’ve played.  That aside though, the battles are a lot of fun.

The adventuring part outside of that is alright too.  There’s a lot to consider.  Mounts, buildings, shops, taverns, item creation and whatever else but it’s drip-fed to you slowly enough that it’s not overwhelming.  And it’s quite nice getting new spells or a decent bit of gear, especially if it helps you get past a particularly tricky foe.  We eventually got a bit bored of reading some many conversations and just starting skipping to the end so that we could get back to the battles but the amount of depth that Puzzle Quest brings to the genre is certainly a benefit.

Speaking of benefits, this remaster does well to make small but important improvements to the original game.  Aside from the new Warlock class and over forty new items to check out, you also get a fresh 4K graphical upgrade, the ability to ‘match five’ in an L-shape, being able to adjust the difficulty before any battle, quicker animations and a new ‘Mana Storm’ feature which just resets the board when there are no more matches (rather than ending the battle).

As such, this is definitely the new definitive way to play Puzzle Quest although arguably it might be better on the Switch where you benefit from touch controls rather than playing it on a DualSense controller on your PS5 and the original PvP mode isn’t available in this version on any format (not that we’re too bothered about losing that).  The only potential downside is just how long the game is.  At 30-40 hours, that’s a lot of repetition and because you don’t have the luxury of playing this over weeks and months for a review, we did start to get fatigued a bit.  Sure, the quests all have their own storylines but ultimately you’re just playing hundreds of match-three battles and that does get very repetitive, especially if you’ve done this all before on older formats.

But equally, that’s a lot of game and for £11.99 (or £9.59 if you buy by the 2nd of October 2025) you can’t really complain at all.