MARVEL Puzzle Quest Reviews

Is it fun? Sure. It combines the relative mindlessness of matching with some cool hero powers that require team skill alignment and strategy. But here the deal - to add characters to your roster, even once you’ve “won” or “earned” them, it requires in game currency. And the cost goes up and up. If you have two heroes, it might cost 10 “coins” to add another hero but if you have ten or twenty (even if they are all one star, not five star rated heroes) and want to add another hero, now you are looking at 750 coins. Can you earn in game currency by playing? Yes. But be prepared to take weeks of very consistent tournament play … and even then, it can take longer to earn enough to open another roster spot. They throw a few coins at you here and there for additional rewards, but with the roster unlock so expensive, you can’t make much progress. Want to pay to get coins? Be prepared to shell out AT LEAST $20 EVERY TIME to get enough to add ONE HERO. Oh. And you’re on the clock - heroes you don’t add/unlock will expire after a given time. So if you’re a consistent player and have a decent roster, and you spend a lot of time in this game, and you manage to get a great hero that you’re excited about but can’t earn enough coins fast enough…tough crap. I don’t mind paying here and there for a game I enjoy. I know it costs money to develop and support these games. But this is ridiculous. And greedy.

I like the game it’s a fun game to play. However I’ve had frequent “freezing” issues when I’ve earned certain playing incentives. The game will freeze when I go to claim said prizes. Unfortunately every time this has happened It will not save the prizes or any indication I won them, it’s been multiple 5* characters, the points to get to 5* characters even some duplicate 4* star characters. When I brought this to the attention of “help” they completely blew me off. I let them know when the freezing occurs nothing is SAVED. To which they replied that the game didn’t show any of that, to which I retorted of course it doesn’t it freezes completely no data is transferred. Their reply was what I took as a rude dismissal saying they either didn’t care what happened or didn’t believe me. I’ve put a lot of time and some money into playing this game and other Marvel related games. These freezes have been reported before by other players so I’m not sure why they are met with doubt. I will say I won’t be downloading any future games or spending any money moving forward. I won’t give money to a provider that doesn’t believe or care about their players.

Is it fun? Sure. It combines the relative mindlessness of matching with some cool hero powers that require team skill alignment and strategy. But here the deal - to add characters to your roster, even once you’ve “won” or “earned” them, it requires in game currency. And the cost goes up and up. If you have two heroes, it might cost 10 “coins” to add another hero but if you have ten or twenty (even if they are all one star, not five star rated heroes) and want to add another hero, now you are looking at 750 coins. Can you earn in game currency by playing? Yes. But be prepared to take weeks of very consistent tournament play … and even then, it can take longer to earn enough to open another roster spot. They throw a few coins at you here and there for additional rewards, but with the roster unlock so expensive, you can’t make much progress. Want to pay to get coins? Be prepared to shell out AT LEAST $20 EVERY TIME to get enough to add ONE HERO. Oh. And you’re on the clock - heroes you don’t add/unlock will expire after a given time. So if you’re a consistent player and have a decent roster, and you spend a lot of time in this game, and you manage to get a great hero that you’re excited about but can’t earn enough coins fast enough…tough crap. I don’t mind paying here and there for a game I enjoy. I know it costs money to develop and support these games. But this is ridiculous. And greedy.

Is it fun? Sure. It combines the relative mindlessness of matching with some cool hero powers that require team skill alignment and strategy. But here the deal - to add characters to your roster, even once you’ve “won” or “earned” them, it requires in game currency. And the cost goes up and up. If you have two heroes, it might cost 10 “coins” to add another hero but if you have ten or twenty (even if they are all one star, not five star rated heroes) and want to add another hero, now you are looking at 750 coins. Can you earn in game currency by playing? Yes. But be prepared to take weeks of very consistent tournament play … and even then, it can take longer to earn enough to open another roster spot. They throw a few coins at you here and there for additional rewards, but with the roster unlock so expensive, you can’t make much progress. Want to pay to get coins? Be prepared to shell out AT LEAST $20 EVERY TIME to get enough to add ONE HERO. Oh. And you’re on the clock - heroes you don’t add/unlock will expire after a given time. So if you’re a consistent player and have a decent roster, and you spend a lot of time in this game, and you manage to get a great hero that you’re excited about but can’t earn enough coins fast enough…tough crap. I don’t mind paying here and there for a game I enjoy. I know it costs money to develop and support these games. But this is ridiculous. And greedy.

I know developers need to get paid, but in the long run it is not worth it to pay in this game, with one exception.
This game is constantly be updated with new content, which sounds good but is not due to the way you level up heroes. As the hero roster increases, it becomes more difficult to level up a character as the chances to get a hero card decreases. Also, they have this horrible leveling system that forces you to sell duplicate hero cards and give you basically nothing in return. And it’s made even worse due to the limited number of heroes you can have at any time and that duplicate heroes, which you may need later, expire.
Regardless of how much you pay, you need to grind, a.k.a. Play the game over and over again just for a few rewards. It's not fun to play the same thing 4 times in a row, then time it just right to play 2-3 more times.
Then there's the cheating. The AI gets insane chains, especially when it's losing or you are denying it a color it needs. And what’s even worse and where paying is worth it, if you pay a monthly fee, the AI cheats less. So you need to pay for the game to not cheat!
If you still plan to play, go to Reddit for tips. And if you aren’t going to pay, remember that you have a long grind ahead of you, so make decisions for the long haul and avoid instant gratification. E.g. do not open any legendary cards until you are in the 3 to 4 star transition.

Originally, the game was a beta. There were problems, but hey, it was a beta! There were mistakes, there were flaws, and they made changes to powers, and I wasn't always happy, but I understood it. Then the beta ended, and they changed core game concepts and abilities. Here is the thing, I am not griping because I want the game to be totally free, etc... I am griping because I understand that people need to pay for things, and I did! What makes me mad is that after paying for things, they changed characters powers. So once it was out of beta, and I thought things were set, the characters I paid to improve got changed. So basically, what I paid for is gone. This hasn't stopped. They keep changing things. The new characters are mainly stupid too. Where are the ones I want to see? Where are the other x-men? Instead we get squirrel girl? Come on! There are no other game modes. Everything is just the same thing, over and over. All good abilities have been nerfed, and only a few characters are even worth playing. So everyone is pretty much playing the same couple characters. This game is a train wreck. I wont spend money on it anymore because I don't trust them not to change the characters after I pay for them, and the drop rates for covers are terrible. Play anything, but don't waste time or money on this.

Updated: the new design of the jewel grid is so terrible to look at that I don’t think I can keep playing this game. Why are y’all systematically making this product worse?

I have been playing for over four years and have watched as aggressive monetization has overtaken what was once a fun and truly free-to-play game. As other recent reviews note, new characters are added at breakneck speed—when I started playing there were maybe a half dozen 5* characters and more than 50 3* characters. There are now nearly as many 5* characters as 3*, and there hasn’t been a new character added with less than 4* in years. To make matters worse, many recent additions are truly, TRULY broken (Karnak, Polaris, Kitty, and Beta Ray Bill being the standouts here) such that they dominate virtually all versus events. It seems like it can’t be possible that the developer HASN’T noticed this.

In addition, the past few updates have mostly been steps backward from a UI perspective, particularly the changes to the recruit screen in the most recent patch. I also agree with the reviews that have mentioned the frustrating lopsided AI cascade algorithm, which has never improved over all the years I’ve been playing.

You really need all NEW storylines. When is the prologue going to change to something like the first MSH: Secret Wars or Secret Invasion? Even Contest of Champions (the first one). I enjoy this game A LOT, but I’m a bit tired of playing Dark Reign and Cosmic Chaos every few weeks. I’m sure there are lots of players who would agree with me on this. Thank you for listening and I do appreciate the work you all have put into this game. I haven’t enjoyed a gane like this in a long while.

UPDATE; I’m giving the new company who bought this game a low rating. They made some good changes, BUT they disabled the “contact us” within MARVELPuzzleQuest because they don’t like criticisms. I don’t care if criticism is constructive or harsh. If you disable that key contact, that shows what kind of company you are. Even contacting them outside MARVELPuzzleQuest do they refuse to acknowledge. I don’t know if it’s just with me or everyone altogether, but that is not a way to run a company. Were I the CEO of 505 Games, heads would be rolling with a review like this.

Other than that, it is fun, but the lack if new campaigns is starting to make this game a bit boring and feels like work. They seem more concerned with making new boss events than the standard regular event. Hopefully, that will change.

Previously, I would have rated this as a 5 star game. However, R223 which introduced an updated UI has degraded the game experience for myself and others. It feels like a change for the sake of change, without any thought out into matters such as accessibility. While the layout itself remains largely unchanged, the color scheme is not friendly to those with certain vision impairments. While I applaud the updated colors of the tiles, enemy tiles are difficult to distinguish, especially on black tiles. The darker tiles colors are welcome, but the lack of contrasts between the tiles, the black background and the icons on enemy tiles makes game play mistakes more likely, reducing the enjoyableness of the game. Also, the dimming of the whole screen during the opponent’s turn makes it harder to see what the AI is doing. A much better implementation would have been for the background to be a lighter color on the player’s turn and have just the background turn dark on the AI turn. And though not gameplay impacting like the other changes, aesthetically the purple background in the AP bar section is not pleasing, and I could see where someone with vision impairments may have trouble due to the lack of contrast between the purple background and several of the AP colors. This bar really should be a more neutral, contrasting color, like a light gray or silver.

Aesthetics aside, the dark tiles on an even darker screen makes it much harder to tell the colors apart; my eyes are straining to suss out what color/type of tile it is, which is giving me headaches and slowing my play way down. The lack of color contrast also makes it inaccessible for people who are colorblind or otherwise visually impaired. The narrower power bars make it harder to see when I have enough AP to fire a power because they don’t catch my attention as well. And the screen darkening even more on the opponent’s turn makes it so I can’t see what they’re doing or plan my next move. If you’re going to have a darker screen (which really should be a toggle switch for night mode, not the default mode) you have to make the colors for the tiles and AP/health bars a lot brighter. And really, there was nothing wrong with the play screen before. This makeover was completely unnecessary.

I’m a commander of an alliance and a bunch of my players are already threatening to quit because they literally cannot play with this new UI. I’m a VIP player and I spend a lot of extra money on top of that, but I will no longer pay unless this is fixed.

This used to be my favorite mobile game, but lately the designers have been forcing battles that don’t feel fun. The most recent example is the crash of the Titans which pits the player’s Rogue against the game’s Iceman in a one on one. While I was eventually able to overcome Iceman, I spent a large portion of the fight stunned and watched as all my red power got slowly drained away. This did not feel fun.
This isn’t the only recent situation that felt more like a chore than a game. In the Alligator Loki intro event there were two more fights that felt incredibly tedious. One where I had to fight AL as Kraven, and another where I had to fight Yellowjacket as AL. In both situations the fight dragged on and I was left feeling like I just wanted the game to end, which is not a feeling any designer should aim for.
To the design team selecting these match ups, it can be tempting to try to create these gotcha situations because you think more difficulty and longer matches equals fun. I recommend running some playtests with actual players to make sure these situation feel fun, and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

The game is very fun, I have always liked puzzle quest games and I like the Marvel theme. I am also a sucker for collecting and I like the random draws of characters, however this is also the core problem for me. The amount of coins it takes to unlock a single slot for a new character is ridiculous and they give you very few opportunities to earn coins without buying them. It currently requires 500 coins for me to unlock one slot and I’m lucky if I earn 15 coins in the game. I don’t mind spending a little money in the game and I have, but they need to give more coins consistently as prizes and daily bonuses or keep the price of new slots closer to 200 without raising it constantly. At the very least, for the number of character tokens you get they should remove the expiration time of characters that you haven’t recruited yet so you can at least slowly work towards unlocking the characters over time instead of desperately trying to get coins or selling characters you would have liked to keep before they expire.

This is a great game that I have played about 3 months worth now. It’s a lot of fun and the strategy and hero collecting makes for interesting gameplay and fun collecting. Getting a new hero (or villain) and finding ways to incorporate their powers into a team is interesting.

The thing that prevents me from giving this game 4 or 5 stars is that there isn’t any proper iPad support. The game really needs landscape support in iPad (a style already available on the steam version of the game) and at the very least proper scaling for the portrait mode. There are essentially black bars on the sides of the game on iPad because it’s just a blown up iPhone version not a proper iPad upscale.

The other thing is that the early game is very slow as you need to get roster spots to get new heroes. This is done by either being very patient and slowly gaining Hero Points to buy roster spots or just paying real money for HP to get those roster spots. The early game is unforgiving in this way and I think balancing the game to not encourage early spending would be better and possibly attract more players to stick with the game.

It's a fun app, character building gives it a nice aspect but the developers seem to think flooding the game with higher level characters (4* and 5*) is a good idea. The problem is that it makes it nearly impossible to build a complete four or five star character. Then if you should luck upon a coveted five star you probably won't get another cover for that character any time soon. The game is weighted to players who have been playing the longest when there were fewer characters. They were able to build those and have stronger teams. Due to this the same players tend to come in first in most events and tournaments which gives them high level rewards which again makes them even stronger. The developers actually need to play the game from scratch to get an understanding of how frustrating this is.

Furthermore, while the probability of AI tile cascades is supposed to be adjusted to be lower it doesn’t bear out in the game with the AI routinely receiving a greater ratio of tile cascades. The Deadpool Daily has been glitched for two years with the same issue and after multiple emails to the developers they have yet to resolve it.

So the plus side is you dont have to pay for anything to get where you need to go in the game. You play through missions for characters, their covers for skills and to upgrade them, currency to level, etc. But eventually, you hit a cap of just a few characters before you even finish the prologue. At that point, you will ALWAYS be struggling between what characters to keep and what to toss because ALL your gold coins need to be going to extra slots and even then, you will never have enough slots for the amount of characters you get. So plus, always getting characters but also a fail in that the coins you have to grind for and you will never have enough. I HIGHLY recommend dropping money on the VIP (even if just once), it was unplayable for me otherwise. It gives you a bunch of coins that you can dump into slots so you have a good roster to work with. Plus the extra rewards dont hurt. This is also why i give it 3star, because it is HIGHLY difficult without that extra push. But not unplayable.
If i had to recommend anything, im surprised we cant save team setups yet and, as a comic book collector myself, it would be nice to have a collection we could see of all the covers we had because you have to throw away a lot that arent as good as others. Maybe rather than throw away, toss in a binder and get a reward for completing the set?

I will start by saying I love this game. I play it daily. It is like candy crush for marvel fans. I hope the devs read this as my only gripe is a large one, I hate how hard it is to add characters and upgrade them. If you play a lot, You get to a point very quickly where you get the same characters over and over, and once they are champions you can’t upgrade them. So it becomes a fun game with no purpose other than to kill time. The in game purchases are expensive, and only give you a chance at a new character or an upgrade to existing characters in lineup. I could spend $100 and have no guarantee of a new character I don’t already have and can’t upgrade. So I could spend $100 and get nothing of use in the game. I have spent money only to walk away with purple iso that you can’t use. I have millions of purple iso waiting to upgrade characters that I can’t ever seem to get. Why can’t we buy individual characters? Or Tokens that guarantee you a new 3 or 4 star character? I would pay for those. But not paying $20 for a 1-25 shot at a new character. My odds may not be exact but you get the point. Thanks for listening. Please consider changes. Shards was a step in the right direction

Update: since my first review I discovered that I’d made a mistake. When events pop up you get to choose a start and end time. I didn’t realize that. That’s why I found myself with nothing to do. One can still have times where you’re waiting to heal and can’t play, but those times have become fewer.

First, you don’t have to spend real money although there are many options to do so. This game requires thought to get your team together and find the best match. Things that bug me: when fighting the computer they always seem to get four+ matches and endless cascades. I mean it just gets stupid. Also, after finishing the prologue, you can only play this game for about twenty minutes or so before you’re out of heals and find yourself with nothing to do. This is endlessly frustrating and why the devs would make a game that I can’t play for as long as I want when I want kind of defeats the purpose of a “game”. That said, a solid four star game that you’ll want to play.

I’ve been playing this game for awhile now, and while I admit that I often find certain things about it frustrating, this game can very easily be played and enjoyed for free with no ads interrupting. Yes, it can be hard getting started but thats part of what makes it fun, it continues to challenge you and come out with new content regularly. I will say that finding the covers you need becomes increasingly difficult with the number of variations on the same characters and the more stars a character has the more difficult it is to get more than one cover for them. I recommend to new players that you stick with the characters your getting covers for in the beginning because those dark avengers covers will advance quickly to powerful characters. Something I did not realize at the time. The game also gives you a ton of ISO which as you advance starts stacking up in a ridiculous way because you cant use it for much of anything. I’m not a huge fan of the new thing you can equip to characters as I don’t find them to be very valuable but truthfully if you just want to enjoy a game and have fun then this is a great game for you.

... and still love the game, playing it every day! (Day 1584) Like any game things are easier when you pay. But that’s mainly in the beginning. And that’s only if you want to progress faster or challenge other well-established players and teams. If you just want to play events and collect covers, you can. You can select the difficulty level for an event even one below your current ranking, if that’s what you need.

I’m at a point or I can get the 4-star cover progression reward for almost every event. I still can’t effectively challenge the top teams in PVP, I but that’s OK since it’s not necessary for the game (or me). It’s one of the few games that I felt the need less and less to pay to play the longer I played. Of course at first it took patience and perseverance and the need to resist the desire to have to progress to the top so quickly.

I’m glad there are events that are pretty easy and those that are very hard, so it’s not too discouraging nor boring. I’m still experimenting with different combinations of players and teams. I will admit that like many it seems like the AI cheats, because he gets so many more combinations of matches than I ever do. (I call the AI “Sir Hacksalot”.) But most of the time I am a way stronger team than his so I can forgive it.

I’ve been playing since the beginning. I think it was out for only a few months when I joined. I love the game, and have played just about every day since I started thanks to the Deadpool daily event. The only complaint I have is regarding the milestones. They didn’t exist when the game first started. It took a few years before they came out. The problem with them is how is old timers were punished for our collection. What I mean is that instead of us getting credit for many of the milestone requirements, which we already accomplished, we had to either re-recruit characters we already had, or delete them thereby forfeiting all our hard work to get them maxed out. I wish we wouldn’t been acknowledged for our loyalty instead of punished for it.
Other than that this is my favorite game on mobile and probably will be forever. I love the way characters are released and how they use our opinions to that aim as well as others.

I haven’t missed a day playing this game for nearly 2 years. You do not have to pay to be good at this game, however, it does take time and consistency to collect the cards you most desire. I gave 5 stars, but I do have one critique. The money you have to spend for tokens is outrageous. Just like any type of market...deals sell!! You just don’t give enough tokens for what your spending. I have spend 25 on tokens and literally didn’t get anything good or anything I could use. It’s like you gamble your money to get something you may not need or want. For that reason and that reason only I just purchase the VIP. I realize how big this game is and our clan is pretty dope and we communicate a lot so regardless I’m gonna play but we have all discussed this issue and an update for this would be very much appreciated and would keep long time players very in tune with this game.

Thanks for a great game! However, all good things can become better in some way.

This is a great game and I have seen many improvements over the 2 and 1/2 years I’ve been playing. The “shards” improvement has been one of the best. I have one suggestion. Instead of shards being designated to specific characters, I suggest that shards be designated to a star level and the user can distribute them to the character they choose. For example, instead of 6 shards for
3-star Cyclops, I just receive 6 3-star shards. Once I get 300, I can choose which character I want to use them for. Please consider that suggestion. I think it would be a great improvement.

PVP needs to be improved. A new consideration for PVP would be to not allow someone to be attacked while they are engaged in a PVP battle. It gets frustrating when you’ve won a battle for 50 pts and find out that you’ve lost 120pts while you in a battle. You can’t win fast enough to keep up with the losses.

Baron Zemo and The Masters of Evil, Nimrod, Spot (Johnathan Ohnn), Rintrah, Attuma, Orka, Mr. Negative (Martin Li), Shocker, Annihilus, Cassie Lang, Morlun, Immortal Abomination, King Cobra and the Serpent Society, and Overdrive are waiting to be in the game. I think Big Wheel needs a tune up for his damage hopefully you can make him great again (Big Wheel needs more damage:)).

Deadpool’s new event is called “The Hero at the End of this Story” it’s a 7 day story event and it has lots of goons Hammer, Maggia, Symbiotes, The Hand, ISO-8 Brotherhood Mutants, Arcadebots and Doombots, A.I.M, and the featuring the new goons Pirates. Deadpool is scared that there’s going to be a hero at the end of this story so he prevents the player from getting to the end by sending minions to stop you. Deadpool’s food truck will be the boss and doesn’t swap tiles however it features phases from the food truck’s passives to take your food orders if you have enough AP to serve if not you take the damage. It’s going to be a fun one developers! Would you accept my suggestion for MPQ 10th anniversary? Let’s find out.

I’ve played this game for just over five years. You can play often or take breaks but when you come back, it’s easy to pick back up.
They have packs ranging from $1 to $100 that you can choose to buy. I absolutely love how often the change the options you can purchase, while also sending a few freebies your way.
This game is a great stress reliever when you’ve had a bad day. They’ve done a great job of not making it feel just like a matching game. They have different events for solo & alliances. There’s really so much to do! The developers are always working hard & adding new characters!
My only downside would be how the same characters rule versus events. Once players find out the broken characters that work together well, if you don’t have them, don’t bother with versus.
There is plenty to enjoy with this game and I will continue to play for as long as it’s available.

I love this game, I really do. The problem is that I can’t win any battle except for the beginning story battles of which I have completed a long time ago. The A.I. is way too powerful. It can obtain special moves and chains almost instantly while it takes me forever to get one special move. I am also getting pitted against way more powerful players/characters who win every single time. I can’t upgrade my characters because I can’t obtain any hero vault tokens. I can’t keep any characters I like because when I get a new higher tier character, I have to either delete a character I already have or I have to buy a new slot with hero tokens which are very hard to get unless you buy them. The A.I. also does 10x more damage than me and it has extremely long chains. I can’t advance at all unless I play for weeks and weeks or I spend $20. This is ridiculous. Fix the upgrade system and make the game easier to play, and don’t make the A.I. cheat when it’s losing because that happens often. As of right now I don’t recommend this game to anyone until adjustments are made!
😡

This game has been off and on my radar a few times over the last few years. I finally settled on this game back in 2018 when I needed things to do while I was laid up in a hospital bed for a few months healing from a car accident. This game became a daily routine and since then it’s been almost a daily play. I use it for fun and also use it for cognition building as these games can help.
It’s simply a fun game that lets you build great Marvel characters and work to beat your opponent and move up levels while acquiring more of what you need to keep going…all without spending a dime. If you do have money in your budget, you can move along faster but that’s up to you ($20 or so a month is all you really need to get some cool extras). If you like match 3 games or Marvel or both, this game is a must get. Another cool thing they do is they move along with whatever is going on in the comics and MCU so you don’t ever feel like the game gets stale. It’s a game collaborating with the actual Marvel Universe. They do that very well and the game is mentioned on the podcast “This Week in Marvel” almost weekly.
Need a fun game with some unique twists from your average match 3 game, this is it.

This game is great. It is the only game I’ve ever played that I have actively played daily since launch. During that time I’ve seen a lot of improvements to this game, most positive.
I disagree with pay to play. If you put in enough time, and do the right events, you hit a point where the game is giving you enough tokens (in game currency) and covers to keep yourself going. You can win new covers through gameplay or legendary covers that they hand out as you level your character. You get rewarded with new characters for leveling existing characters. Or for $10/month you can go VIP and get daily prizes.
The reason I gave it 3 stars is as follows. The game needs to figure out what to do with extra covers. If you have a character that is not championed and you get a 6th cover in any one color, you have to get rid of it. This makes it very frustrating when you do not have enough iso to champion the character, or you have less than 13 covers in that character. I’ve had many circumstances where I’ve had to throw away a 4 or 5 Star card because I couldn’t use it. It’s enraging considering these are rare pulls. The ability to use these duplicate cards towards another color once you’ve hit 5 covers in a single color would be great.
There are also times when I have an issue with the game. Getting a generic response from customer service is not the best treatment of customers, especially when it doesn’t solve the issue.