After having checked out Marvel Contest of Champions earlier last year, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I looked into the other Marvel smartphone games. Marvel Puzzle Quest released about six and a half years ago, so it's even older than Contest of Champions. It's been about a decade since I'd played the first Puzzle Quest game, on DS, and I remember enjoying it overall at the time. I've played a few match games like it since then (namely Puzzle & Dragons: Super Mario Bros. Edition a few years ago), and although there have been tweaks to the original Puzzle Quest basic formula over the years, it seems like the concept really hasn't evolved much at all in the Marvel edition.
The game has the usual light RPG trappings (e.g. special attack meters based on the color of the pieces you clear) coupled with familiar Marvel characters and the usual annoying free-to-play mechanics. It looks like the details of the latter have varied over time and there's the usual randomness of getting characters you want, a premium subscription service, and a bunch of in-game currencies, but the main currency is "Hero Points" which you need to expand the roster of heroes you can keep. IGN bewilderingly gave it a high rating when the game first came out, but I got bored grinding to get more Hero Points pretty early on, and the core gameplay itself is so mindless that I gave up on the game pretty quickly. The one thing I liked about the game is that it uses actual Marvel comic cover art, but otherwise this was a completely disposable game for me. A remake of the original Puzzle Quest was released for Switch about six months ago, but reviews were pretty middling. I suppose I'm not the only one who finds that what was somewhat novel gameplay a decade ago hasn't aged well, Marvel skin or not.