Puzzle Quest devoured a fairly large chunk of my life back in 2007. Puzzle Quest: Galactrix… just didn’t do it for me. Now Puzzle Quest is back with a true sequel to the throne.

If you’re not familiar, Puzzle Quest takes a gem-based puzzle game, like Bejweled, and wraps a fun fantasy RPG adventure around it. Rather than just matching gems to clear the board, you’re matching gems to power attacks and spells which you’re using to defeat your opponent, who is trying to do the same. It works well, and is incredibly addictive.

Puzzle Quest 2 looks to return to the formula that made the original such a blast, along with a boatload of polish and additions. Not only have they added prettier graphics and a dungeon crawler experience, but you now play a puzzle to do almost everything in the game. Open a door? Play a puzzle. Collect treasure? Play a puzzle. You can almost hear Xzibit saying “Yo dawg, we heard you like puzzles…”

I picked up the original Puzzle Quest for the DS, and the touchscreen/stylus setup was a perfect match for gem swapping. Some of my other friends swore by their XBLA versions of the game. My first instinct was to go the handheld route again, but I think I’ve now decided to wait the extra week (PQ2 came out this week for the DS, next week for XBLA) and pick it up on the console, for a couple of reasons.

The XBLA version will offer high-def graphics and an easier online tournament mode for versus matches. And for roughly half the price of the DS version.

That’s my plan at the moment… it’s entirely possible that in a couple of days the amount of goblins that I haven’t been killing with puzzles may drive me mad and I’ll rush down to the store and buy the DS version for the sweet, sweet fix.