For some reason, you can't change the music volume once you've started a game of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. There's no way to access the settings options from within the game proper. So if you've started a game and you're not interested in hearing the space music in this sci-fi match-3 RPG (how's that for genre stew?), that's too bad. You have to quit out of your game, turn the music off, then go back into the game. And if that's not annoying enough, there's no way to save your settings. So the next time you turn on your Nintendo DS for a quick fix of sci-fi match-3 RPGing, you're going to have to turn the music down again. Which you'll probably forget until you're already playing, at which point you'll have to quit out of the game, turn the music off, and then go back into the game.

But I don't care one whit. Because I don't expect to actually enter a game of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix from the main screen very often. Instead, I expect this thing is going to be in my Nintendo DS until Kingdom come.

Read the full review of heinously addictive Puzzle Quest: Galactrix after the jump.

The original Puzzle Quest was one of those ideas most surprising for the fact that someone hadn't thought of it earlier. Take the appeal of an RPG in which you level up a character. Instead of combat, build it around a head-to-head match-3 puzzle against monsters you're supposed to be fighting. Add special powers based on the colors of gems you match. You might think it all sounds silly. You'd be right. But unless you've played it, you can't appreciate how mind-numbingly, stupendously compelling it is.

Now the developers at Infinite Interactive, formerly known for their serious strategy games, have improved on the basic formula in every way. Everything good in Puzzle Quest is now good +1 in Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, which shifts the setting into space, gives the RPG progression even more variety, and reworks the match-3 into something really far out.

The space setting is perfect for letting you roam at will and do space stuff, all performed with some variation of the match-3 game: hacking LeapGates to open new systems, haggling with merchants to buy weapons and ships, battling pirates and hostile factions, mining asteroids to sell raw materials at ports, or crafting new ship components in shops. Instead of playing a character who learns skills, which was the basic model of the previous Puzzle Quest, now you're buying and improving ships based on their shield, weapon, engine, and computer ratings, each represented by a different colored gem in the match-3 game, and each influenced by different types of equipment. There are shield generators, psionic projectors, weapons jammers, missiles, lasers, thrusters, repair bots, temporal displacers, and scads of other space doo-dads, all carefully built into the color-scheme of the match-3 game and all scattered throughout a cleverly imagined galaxy.

All this great sci-fi flavor is a marked improvement over the token fantasy sheet draped over the first Puzzle Quest. It also provides a very different type of progression. Rather than simply going up levels and getting more and more powerful, you're opening new strategies. You can rearrange your strategy freely based on what kind of ship you're using and what components you're using. Whereas you had to pick a class and stick with it in Puzzle Quest, now you can just rearrange your ship at will.

Then there's the zero-G match-3 gimmick, which looks awfully daunting at first. It's based on hexes rather than the familiar Bejeweled grid, and there's no strict up and down. The board can shift in any of six directions. What's more, the part of the board that shifts is based on the direction you swapped your gems. There's a lot going on here. Don't expect to bring your Bejeweled skills to bear without making some adjustments. You're not in Kansas anymore. You're not even on Earth.

Luckily, Galactix is a forgiving game. Even when you fail, you keep the gems you've accumulated and you can immediately try again. But once the zero-G system clicks, regular Bejeweled is going to seem even more pedestrian than it already is.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is currently available for the PC or for the Nintendo DS. The PC version looks really snazzy, but the DS version is recommended since this is the ideal game carry around in your pocket. It's so perfect for short non-committal bursts that it'd be a shame to tether it to something so unwieldy as your computer. Puzzle Quest: Galactrix wants to be free! Free to eat into every possible minute of downtime you can spare, as well as several you can't.