At the end of each world you get to fight a boss (twice), with a mini-boss part way through. It incorporates the Mario game overworld style of individual worlds with levels dotted within. Interestingly, the Mario edition is a different beast. There are some side quests, and later on a “Colosseum” opens where you can pit your team(s) against challenges to gain extra experience, so there’s no shortage of things to do to help get your levels up. This is especially frustrating against the bigger, tougher enemies later on, and can often feel extremely unfair. Look, I know that match-three puzzlers by their very nature are random, but it’s infuriating to see an eight string combo overkill three enemies when you only matched three orbs together, only to then see a two string combo go through when you attempted to make the most of a bad layout. The main core of the game – matching orbs to deal damage and hearts to gain health – works very well, and there’s a satisfying feeling when you manage to string together a big combo and deal MASSIVE DAMAGE, it’s just a shame that it can be so frustratingly random. The whole thing feels like it’s been put together rather cheaply. While some of the monster designs are rather nice, the character designs feel like they’ve been lifted straight from Pokémon or Yu-gi-oh, and the music sounds like it’s being played by a holiday camp house band. Gungho have furnished this with a rather run of the mill story about an organisation trying to tear down the current world and rebuild it in their image. The free-to-play mobile version restricted your play time to five goes before you had to wait for the tokens to recharge, but here you can play as long as you want to. Match several different colours and match many lots of orbs and you will obtain a combo, the higher the combo the more damage your monsters will do on that turn. The more orbs you match the more damage that monster will do. If you don’t know what Puzzle and Dragons consists of, where have you been for the last three years? Basically, it’s like a cross between Pokémon and Puzzle Quest: you start with three base monsters that have elemental attributes (Fire, Water, Leaf/Grass, Light and Dark) and you journey through dungeons matching orbs of colour in stacks of three or more to deal damage to enemies. But rather than address the new Mario part, we should start with Puzzle and Dragons Z.

With downloads in the tens of millions, it’s a reason why many are trying their hand at the free-to-play game market. Gungho’s Puzzle and Dragons is a bit of a puzzle-RPG phenomenon.

Puzzle and dragons z present codes