I loved PuzzleQuest: Challenge of the Warlords on the Mac, when I reviewed it for Mac|Life last year. The game originally debuted on the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP back in the spring of 2007, but I was a bit late to the party. No matter, the gimmick of match-three "battles" versus computer-controlled enemies, with the RPG elements of being able to level up your character and develop skills and spells, just doesn't get old.

And now TransGaming's brought the same game to the iPhone and iPod touch. The first installment, Chapter 1: Battle of Gruulkar (App Store link), is a port of the first third of the game, including the content from the Revenge of the Plague Lord expansion pack. Everything's the same--the locations, characters, quests, and story haven't changed a bit, but thankfully, neither has the super-fun gameplay.

Tapping the icons instead of clicking them works just fine--occasionally we would have to tap the gems in the bottom row of a game board a couple times before the game picked up our taps. Since the Mac game offers a lot of information when you mouse over things (the effects of each spell or item in your lists, for example), the iPhone version of the game has to compensate there. The solution--which also works--is to tap a spell once for a pop-up describing what it does, then again to actually cast the spell.

Here, I've tapped the Charm spell once for a reminder of what it does. To cast it, I just tap again.

That leaves text readability as the game's biggest problem. Some of these text boxes are just tiny, and the fancy serif font can get squint-inducingly small. If you've played another PuzzleQuest version, you probably have a decent idea of what the text boxes are saying without needing to read each word. But newbies to the game might start to worry that maybe they need reading glasses after all. EDIT: Since we published this review, the 1.2 update to this app improved the text's readability a lot. 

I had to shrink this screenshot a little for posting (from 480 pixels wide to 380), so the text here looks even smaller than it does in the game. Click to see an actual-size (480-pixel) screenshot -- the text is still quite wee.

Just don't worry about the game's fun, or its looks or stability. We never experienced a crash, and all the same animations and eye candy from the big versions are here too. At 72.9MB, it's on the large side for iPhone apps, and the largest in my library at the moment (No. 2 is Poker Solitaire at 29.4MB, in case you care). It's $9.99 in the App Store, but TransGaming promises that Chapters 2 and 3 will let you keep the character you started in Chapter 1, and have "a downward pricing model, offering a unique value-focused gaming experience." For comparison, the Mac version of the game is currently $19.99.

EDIT: The day after this review was originally published, TransGaming announced that Chapter 2 of PuzzleQuest for the iPhone would be a free update, out soon. The first two chapters should total roughly 40 hours of gameplay for $9.99--not too shabby.

Same old locations and quests you know and love--we'll always have Silvermyr.

Leveling up our illustrious character Thrilhaus.