Puzzle Quest - Gameplay Part 3 - Capturing/Misc

Capturing Enemies

Once you've earned enough gold you can go into your citadel and build a stable. What this does is allow you to capture any enemy you've defeated at least three times. Like so...

Here we have an Ogre ripe for capturing (though in this case it's not a random encounter and thus I can't remember if it counted as a kill or not). Now capturing is much different than your usual battles. You have to solve a puzzle. Every enemy type has a unique puzzle to it. Some are fairly simple, some are not. For example, here is the board for capturing Ogres...

The idea, as you've probably guessed, is to destroy all the gems with no leftovers. Those good at these kind of puzzles should be able to figure it out, but I'm not so I'm cheating and looking them up. Once you clear the board you've successfully captured the Ogre and you get a little message...

Like the message says, build a Mage's Tower in your citadel and you can learn "Thump!", which is a handy offensive spell. I will talk about the Citadel and everything you can do within next time, which should hopefully be the last time I need to talk about Puzzle Quest. 

One more thing about capturing though, you can capture certain enemies that you can use as 'Mounts'. They give you an extra spell to take into battle as well as allow you to travel the map quicker (sadly, it doesn't seem like you can just fly from place to place, even if my mount is a Griffon). Quite handy

Random Thoughts

I enjoy this game as a brief distraction. I basically skip through the actual "cutscenes" but the problem I'm having with it is that it's getting a bit too long. Granted, I'm doing most, if not all, the side-quests that I can. But the gameplay is started to get a bit samey, and right now the only enemies that give me trouble is the bosses. There's not much variety to music so I've resorted to muting it and just playing my own tunes over it and the map is starting to fill with random enemies. Once I had to fight four battles in a row trying to get to a destination. According to my Raptr, I've played 17 hours of Puzzle Quest in the past month. The game is getting to the length of an actual RPG, but it doesn't really have the variation or exploration of one.

I'm using Puzzle Quest as a 'secondary' game, so I'm not forcing myself to rush through 'Super Mario 64', but I'm quickly finding myself trying to rush through this instead. The sooner this ends the better, not because I hate it, but to prevent myself from hating it.

Oh well, back to Super Mario 64 for now...