Gyromancer

I'm sure that nearly everyone who looked at this game or heard of it instantly related it to the overnight classic Puzzle Quest, including me. I'm here to inform you that this game is an entirely different monster.

Gyromancer, the love child of PopCap Games and SquareEnix, is a puzzle game with RPG elements shoehorned on. You guide a character through close to a dozen different maps on a quest to do some sort of mission and save the day and blah blah blah. Really, the storyline for this game feels as forced as the Renn-Fair dialogue and can be almost entirely skipped without consequence. That said, let's get to the meat and potatoes of the game.

The puzzle aspect of the game is, essentially, Bejeweled Twist. You're given a grid of assorted gems and are able to rotate a square of four gems clockwise. This takes some getting used to which, I'll admit, was part of the charm of the game for me. Matching certain gems causes you to fill up your monster's attack meters and filling those causes certain gems to appear that can damage your opponent. The only way they'll attack you is by filling a meter (fills up if you don't make a match or don't match gems of the opponent's color) and, upon filling, creates a countdown gem. They don't make any movements, so essentially you're playing solitaire.

Learning how to make things work well takes time, patience, and adaptation. In the early part of the game, you're able to make non-matching movements without much penalty, but they take that away later in the game and, for me at least, it got a lot more interesting. You'll either love this or hate it.

The presentation is alright, though nothing great. Each monster and character is drawn well but that's all they are. There aren't any animations and, even on the map, your movements are just your picture sliding from place to place.

As said, this is a very different game than Puzzle Quest, and unfortunately this is in a bad way. There's next to no customization. You can find and level up monsters but a lot of them are so bad you don't care and others become obsolete after a short amount of time. You can pick what three monsters you want to take into battle but, when a lot of them are so bad compared to others, you just take the really good ones and not care about any others. Completing any map after the first few takes, literally, hours of defeating little monsters to get to the boss. My hatred of grinding makes this feel longer, and when two hours of tedious grinding feels even LONGER...well, you get the idea. The skin-deep story doesn't make you want to continue and you're left with something that feels like a chore after a certain amount of time.

Everything said, I probably invested a good 10-12 hours in the game before I didn't want to play anymore. Not a bad value, especially considering I was only halfway done with the game, but the fact that I didn't want to finish Gyromancer says something. Try it out if you're a puzzle fan but don't buy it if you're expecting another Puzzle Quest or, literally, any RPG elements outside of a bad script and some drawings of people and monsters.

For those of you who thought this game was going to be like the Puzzle Quest games, I say you are only half right!

A very technical meeting between PopCap Games and Square Enix (at a pizza joint - is that right?) is where the idea for the game Gyromancer was born.

Needless to say, people will assume that Gyromancer is a Puzzle Quest clone. It is not.

Gyromancer is more like Bejeweled; how to twist and create multiple chains with power-ups and... it does sound like Puzzle Quest doesn't it? Hmmm...

Anyways, I would suggest you download the demo and give it a shot yourself and see what you think about the game. If you liked the Puzzle Quest games, but are looking for something different besides the story (warlords or space), then give this game a shot. I did, and now I own it!