Jewel Quest: The Sapphire Dragon

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Jewel Quest: The Sapphire Dragon, released on PC in 2012 and ported to Nintendo 3DS in 2015, is the sixth mainline entry in the Jewel Quest franchise. This game follows an expedition to a mysterious temple in search of a fabled… look, this is a Match-3 Puzzle game. The story is cliché and boring and you’ll soon just be skipping it to play the puzzles anyway, so why don’t I do the same and get on with the review?

Jewel Quest: The Sapphire Dragon’s presentation makes use of 2D images for its gameplay, as well as 2D artwork for its still cutscenes in between rounds. This story is delivered via competently-acted but poorly-written voice-over over a dramatic soundtrack.

As with the rest of the Jewel Quest franchise, this game takes Bejeweled’s Match-3 Puzzle gameplay and makes a slight change to it, with players aiming to clear each of the game’s boards by making matches in front of all of its squares. It’s a decent enough formula, and if that’s all it was, I would likely make all of the same complaints I made in my review of Jewel Quest IV – namely, that being a competent Bejeweled clone is hardly interesting or noteworthy at this point.

Thankfully, The Sapphire Dragon works to keep things interesting by introducing a variety of different game modes in its campaign levels. Some require players to clear a part of the puzzle to access the rest, some limit the camera to only a part of the board until you clear specific spaces to continue, some will freeze spaces until you direct a burning gem near them to melt the ice… while the core gameplay here remains largely the same, I appreciate that a lot of effort went into ensuring that this formula didn’t become stale.

Another addition to the formula is different characters players can play as and gradually upgrade, with abilities that can help during the game, such as allowing players to swap any two pieces, or shuffle the game board. Again, nothing extraordinary, but it does a good job of making this more interesting.

There are still some issues that I feel keep this from being a truly great Puzzle game in its own right, however. The lack of a multiplayer mode is a major one. The other is the lack of any sort of endless mode – players pretty much only have the game’s campaign to play through.

Still, while it lacks important elements that could have made this a great spin on the Bejeweled formula, Jewel Quest: The Sapphire Dragon is nevertheless a huge improvement over the previous game in the series, offering a good amount of variety in its different game modes. I only wish those game modes weren’t so rigidly locked into a single-player campaign. Still, for $6, this is a decent Puzzle game worth trying out on Nintendo 3DS.

tl;dr – Jewel Quest: The Sapphire Dragon is a Match-3 Puzzle game that takes the series’ Bejeweled-style gameplay and adds in a wealth of different game modes to keep things fresh and interesting. Unfortunately, the lack of a multiplayer mode or any way to play the game other than its solo campaign limits this game. It’s still a decent game for Puzzle fans, but not a great one.

Grade: C+

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