Puzzle Craft 2, if anything, made me uninstall it and go back to Puzzle Craft 1 instead. It's not a terrible game and it improves/adds complexity in many aspects over the original, but all of this comes at the cost of terrible free to play mechanics, less gameplay for free, various ways to nudge the player into giving the game money and an overall sense of disappointment with most systems in place. Almost every new cool thing they've added comes with a balance of desire to uninstall the game, so that's not very fun. (Also I'm sorry, my iPad ate my screenshots)

The core gameplay is very similar to Puzzle Craft 1, you have to make buildings for your city, unlocking upgrades along the way. There are fields you can harvest from - using the same tile-matching mechanic - to make food which you can then use to mine. The puzzle gameplay is still fun, you drag lines through the boards, matching tiles and creating better ones along the way. In the first game, you had a base of 20 moves before your game was over, now it's 10 (and you can use a premium item in order to double that). You also discover new species of tiles - better wheat, vegetables and livestock - with special abilities, such as not taking turns when you gather them, but they require a lot of resources to research, or you can spend some premium currency. And you can have multiple cities around, which is neat, but you need to get many more upgrades than usual.

I had to stop playing Puzzle Craft 2 because I didn't have any more money to keep playing. Usually, what you'd do is sell some of your extra resources - in the first game I always had too much lumber so I could sell some off - but here, no such luck, I barely had anything to sell, so I had to stop playing and wait for taxes to collect, or something like that. There is a building whose sole purpose is to make you watch video advertisements so you can get pithy rewards, how bad is that?

A streamlined interface, upgraded systems with achievements, badges, quests and better progression won't save yet another sequel by an EA-owned dev who focuses on profits more than pure fun gameplay. Just like many of these free to play trainwrecks, PuzzleCraft 2 has a core of a good game that could be turned into something good without being free, but nah, the first game is much better still.

Posted
AuthorJérémie Tessier