Puzzle Tactics is a 2D minimalist hybrid of a block placement/pathing puzzle game and a turn based tactical combat game... which is not nearly as cool as it sounds. To take a turn based tactical combat game and relegate it to the level of an Adobe Flash Sokoban ripoff takes extreme levels of dumbing down... to put it another way, this isn't making puzzle games better, it's making turn based tactical combat games worse.
Each puzzle level gives you a select number of units and you need to kill off the enemy units by making the right moves. To ensure this acts more as a puzzle game, RNG isn't a factor... again, a great example of why this game concept just doesn't work. Because, you know, you could be playing a turn based combat game like the Banner Saga or something. Or this. Decisions, decisions.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game construction kit/toolset, OpenFL Framework. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Puzzle Tactics might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Puzzle Tactics is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
