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Great Family-Friendly Puzzle Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: July 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I'm always on the lookout for great puzzle games for my handheld systems. Cube fits the bill perfectly. It keeps your brain sharp, it's fun for all ages, it has challenging and easy modes, and it's inexpensive, too!

First, the basic premise. You have a path laid out in front of you that you can follow, on any face. There is no "gravity" - you don't fall off if you stray off the path. You just rotate around to another face of that path. You are, of course, a cube. So each move you make is to flop from one face of the cube onto an adjacent face. So far, so easy.

The trick of course is that no path is straightforward. There are all sorts of obstacles to make your quest a challenge. There are blockades to get around. There are rolling bombs to avoid. Some blocks are brittle and will break once you pass over them. Other blocks will make you temporarily invincible. You can use arrows to redirect rolling bombs, triggers to take down walls and to create new blocks, and much more.

There is a very good training suite for you to go through, to learn all of the combinations. Then they have three separate easy groups so that you get the hang of techniques and learn your skills. Each level is timed, and you can replay them in order to get all the "keys" or to do it fast enough to earn you a gold rating.

There's even a level generator, so you can build your own levels, with your own twisted mapping to create the ultimate puzzle!

I really like this game. Of the other puzzle games I enjoy, like the marble puzzles, many of them rely on super-fast reflexes in order to pull off a rolling technique. That's really not the case here. Your "fly-over" when the level starts familiarizes you with where everything is. Then, it's a matter of logic. What order do you have to hit buttons in, what series of arrows will get the rolling bomb to get to a certain destination. The cube only flops in its six directions. You don't need to do tricky angled combinations.

Also, the game is very family friendly. There's no shooting, no blood, no swearing. Just a catchy little tune and a cube.

If I have complaints about this game, it's that the menu controls are sometimes a little sluggish - you can't tell for sure if it did get your menu choice and is just thinking about it, or if you need to hit the button again. Also the fly-overs at the beginning of the level are both a bit quick and a bit hard to follow. Usually I just skip the fly over and assume I'll have to play a given level two or three times to learn its layout before I can begin really trying to solve it.

Still, minor complaints for a game that has a ton of levels and is really inexpensive, too. That's a great combination as far as I'm concerned!

Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I purchased this game knowing that I would enjoy a puzzle game. What I got was not only a puzzle but also a strategy game which is twice as fun. the object of the game is to ultimately collect keys and leave the level before a specific time frame. It sounds easy but it's more complicated than that. Your paths are blocked by obstacles and by bombs. Your exit is blocked and the only way out is to cleverly manipulate bombs and paths to either destroy blockades or to bridge around them.

If you want a mindless game do not purchase this! If you want something which requires you to think about what you are doing and plan your moves then this game is for you.

I like thinking, but not being rushed

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: January 24, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The premise of the game is fairly fun -- move your cube around the board, collect keys, and get to the exit. The puzzle is how to achieve all that without your cube being blown up, sunk or stuck. Figuring out how to do all this is fun, but having a time limit is not. I like to take my time to examine things, appreciate its complexity, and then solve it. This game places a time limit on every level, and if you take too long poking about, you lose and have to start the level over.

There are a LOT of different board elements to deal with. There are fans that blow you away, switches that turn things on and off, tiles that disappear after you pass over them, pushblocks, bombs, sinkholes, and even a couple of monsters. There are so many things to keep track of that a time limit really isn't necessary to make it challenging.

There are unlockable bonus levels for if you manage to beat the "gold" time limit and collect all the keys on all levels within a section. On Easy alone I've only been able to get the gold time once. You can finish the puzzle without collecting all the keys, but you'll never achieve gold status without doing so. In essence the time limit requires you to be very good at spatial dexterity since one misstep will cost you the time you need to get gold.

There is some satisfaction in finishing a level, but the fact that I can't ever unlock anything even on Easy mode is frustrating. What's the point in collecting keys if you can never beat the time? I don't know. I can't see a point in it. Unless you can beat the gold time AND collect all the keys, you can never achieve gold status. I just ended up giving up on that and just making my way to the exit, ignoring the key collection because it no longer serves me a purpose. In harder levels it will be much trickier to get keys and get to the exit, why put a time limit to make things that much harder? I like to think I'm rather smart, but unfortunately I'm quite uncoordinated. It would have been nice to find a puzzler that didn't require coordination to be satisfying.

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