Art Style Review Part Two: Cubello
This week I'm taking a look at the Art Style game series that have been released over Nintendo's WiiWare. Check out previous coverage on the budget series with yesterday's review of the heavenly body that is Orbient.
I tried to start this review with some colloquialism about not judging games by their visual qualities, but with a game like this it's hard not to. There's no normal mapping here. Millions of polygons are not being pushed. No surround sound. No amount of visual gimmicks attempt to distract the player from realizing that they are staring at nothing but a bunch of cubes. Quite simply, Cubello features minimalist visual design so stark that Mark Rothko would think it appears too bare. Anyone turned off by the screenshot that accompanies this article might as well move on right now. I mean it too. There's nothing here to appeal to the graphic whores and no part of this review will even bother with trying to convince them otherwise. What I do hope to press upon those of you still reading this review is that Cubello is one of the greatest experiences Wii has to offer and shouldn't be passed up. Hit the jump to find out why.
Just like any other great puzzle game, Cubello's rules are simple: starting with a large structure of colored blocks, the player must clear away all the blocks on the screen by connecting sets of 4 similarly colored cubes together, save for the specially marked Cubello at the center. Using the Wii remote's aim as a cursor, the player fires additional blocks at the structure to connect groups of blocks together. You're given a few blocks to start firing away at the cubed contraption, but rewarded with randomly colored cubes when you successfully remove cubes from the puzzle. The player is able to clear more blocks at once by chaining together multiple sets of blocks just as they would in games like Zuma (aka Magnetica) or Super Puzzle Fighter.
The one-button design could not be any simpler and the color matching mechanic is intuitive enough, but what makes the game completely hypnotizing is how the concepts of space and depth are toyed with. As the player fires blocks at the block structure, it will rotate and spin as if it is floating in space without the effects of gravity. For example, a shot that lands on the bottom side of the puzzle will flip it end over end, a shot landing on the left side will have it spin like a globe, etc. What starts as a simplistic twist on a shooting gallery becomes a twirling array of changing color as you attempt to create massive chains to take out entire arms of a puzzle while viewing the puzzle for all angles. It's a test of accuracy, timing, and quick thinking that isn't seen as often as I'd like to see in puzzle games.
While Cubello isn't a literal translation of any of the games found in the bit Generations games, it features the same type of aesthetic, level progression and unlockables that one would expect from an entry into the quirky series. The game's tutorial is narrated by an strangely familiar voice, shows surprising amount of depth in its puzzle designs, and has enough of them to keep players coming back for hours. For $6 you're getting an awful lot of entertainment out of 47 measly blocks of space. As a thinking man's Boom Blox, this is without a doubt one of the addictive and lasting puzzle games on Wii and is something could only be accomplished with the console's very different controller. Anyone that can get past the game's very unconventional presentation owes it to themselves to play this game.
10 out of 10
Game-Boy
Posted to Hot Stuff, Reviews, Video Games on 11 November 2008
· Comments (1)
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I think the minimalist style is as appropriate to this as it is to Echochrome. Definitely on my list of eventual WiiWare purchases.