Or: A lesson on how to screw up what was a good thing.
Let me start by saying I loved playing Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords/Revenge of the Plague Lord. With problems and all that on the PSP, the XBLA release was alright and fixed a majority of the bugs. The PS3 version is fine as well minus the infamous (for this version only) music bug. There was a Nintendo DS version that had a battle bug (the first turn had the same layout of gems no matter the battle). I’m not knowledgeable about the Mac/PC versions but I hear they’re okay if somewhat buggy as well.
So, it comes as a complete shock to me that Infinite Interactive went into the boardroom and said “gee, how can we totally alienate players in our sci-fi RPG/puzzle sequel?”
The answer: Leap gates. THOUSANDS OF THEM (okay, that’s an exaggeration, but still). The most annoying mini-game in the game is the one you will play constantly to move across the galaxy of Galactrix.
For this reason alone, a lot of players stopped playing the sequel to Puzzle Quest. I can’t fault them. What with the challenge of having to match 20-25 matches in a sequence and hope to god the timer doesn’t continue to tick down if you get an unnecessary cascade of matches going. (and yes, if you get all the required matches and your cascade goes on after that and the timer hits zero, guess what? YOU FAIL THE HACK DESPITE YOU WINNING IT!)
Besides that, Galactrix adds in some new mini-games, noteable addition number one: Haggling. Now if you go to a store (and have the party member that does haggling) you can haggle for lower prices (during that menu visit) through a “get most of the gems off the board” mini-game. It’s a nice addition and if you do well you can get a 2.00-17.00% discount in the store during your visit. (If you leave and come back, you have to rehaggle)
Crafting has changed to the hex-based (that this version uses for all puzzles) mini-game and… thankfully, doesn’t require you to get ONLY anvil/hammers like Challenge of the Warlords. It does throw obstacles at you, meanwhile. Overall though, it is less luck-based and can mostly get you out of crap positions to finish crafting items.
Mining is yet another mini-game (one that you’ll probably do more than the others with the exception of leapgates) that’ll give you materials that you can use to craft items or sell to stores to improve your faction rating.
To move away from the mini-games, the stats system of Challenge of the Warlords has been simplified to where on level-up instead of having 6 stats and only 4 skill points to help you improve them, you now have 5 skill points and 4 skills to level up. The main upgrade to this is after high-level play you can have nearly all even stats with a few stand-out skills/stats for your character. No need to buy a citadel and use gold to get the rest of the skill points you need to improve your character more.
Item wise, the game has its share of game breaking items (and this is just for multiplayer!) that Challenge of the Warlord was famous for. The most exciting is the “Time Warp” items, which based on a certain stat means your enemy will not get a certain amount of turns in. Freeing you up to set them up for bombs and novas.
The battles in the game are still as addictive (and seems to be slightly less random/ZOMG AI IS CHEATING!) as Challenges. If you can wrap your head around the “no-gravity” system that Infinite Interactive added, you can get some good cascades going and roll into your opponent depending on how the gems fall.
Online wise: The game is dead, deader than doornail dead. Irony being, the game has only been out for a couple weeks on PSN alone. It was stupid of D3/II for including online achievements/trophies in the game, esp. after the amount of backlash about the DS/PC versions being really buggy scared away potential buyers of this version (as did the leapgate hacks). It’s even more damning when you consider the XBLA version of Challenge requires you to win only ONE online game (which is easy if you have a friend able to throw the game), but Galactrix wants you to win 50 in it’s barren online mode.
Still, if you can weather most of the annoyances, the game is a gem and brings some neat ideas to the table. But for $20, and after loving the hell out Challenge it’s disappointing that I can’t recommend this to everyone but the most hardcore/masochists that want a Puzzle Quest sequel.
Despite the Music Bug in the PS3 version and the unbalances in the DS/PSP versions of it, Challenge of the Warlords (and it’s expansion: Revenge of the Plague Lord) is still the superior outing for this series. Grab that if you’re looking to find out what everyone back in 2006 was going on about. 
Buy/Don’t Buy: Don’t buy. Play the one trick pony flash demo that is more fun that the PC/XBLA demo that is the full game itself. The flash demo is just a random battle that should show you why the original was loved (since that was where the focus of Challenge of the Warlords stayed).