Official Website

Platform: PSP

Genre: Puzzle

Number of Players: 1 - 2

Puzzle madness knows no boundaries on the PSP. The handheld market has become a hot bed of puzzle games lately, and Sony and many third party companies aren’t going to give fans a break for too long. If you can put down whatever your latest addiction is, you might find that D3 Publisher has yet another twist on puzzle fanaticism that will keep you occupied.

Cube; it’s not based on the movie (fortunately) and just like many puzzle games you’ve probably played, the idea is one that is quite simple, at least in theory. You take control of a cube in a 3D virtual world. Your goal; navigate through the maze and reach the objective at the end, and right now you’re probably thinking that this almost sounds too easy, right? Well, it’s definitely not.

The playing field in cube is comprised of a pathway that not only allows you to tumble the cube forward, you can rotate round it, and why exactly would you want to do this? There are obstacles everywhere keeping you from meeting your objective, not to mention a time limit. Each maze will have a series of things that you can encounter to impede or even end your progress. There are fans that will keep you from moving forward, arrows that only allow you to move in a given direction, bombs and lasers that are out to destroy you and even huge gaps that you will need to find a way to get around.

You can find some helpful things however that will certainly make your journey a bit easier for you. Clone cube will let you clone your cube, so while it sits in place, your clone can be navigated ahead, though the real purpose of this is to fill in those pesky gaps that you find. Some cubes in the maze can be pushed to allow access to higher areas while a power ball will arm you with the necessary force to destroy things that might otherwise make your cubes life a short one. You will need these things to not only reach the goal, but you will find in each stage a series of keys. Your secondary objective is to collect these as well as reach the goal while the timer is still gold in order to open up bonus stages in the game.

You will find the Cube challenges you with 135 levels beginning with the training phase and progress from easy, to medium difficulty and finally hard. There are nine different themes thirteen obstacles and hazards, and even more than this. For your friends who are curious about the game but haven’t yet picked it up, you can use Cubes game sharing option to transfer a few levels to them to test for themselves. If however you do have friends that own Cube, you can actually play a two-player version of the game. You can take on the collect mode where you each must collect as many keys as possible, a race to see which player can reach the goal first, a battle where you can destroy your opponent with bombs and other nasty items and even a co-op mode where, yes, you can work together to reach the goal. If you want even more though, you can create your own levels and share them with friends.

Cube is a true 3D title, not like other puzzle games that claim to be put have minor things tossed in to try and be 3D. You can fully rotate in any direction that you want, something that actually becomes paramount if you’re trying to collect all the keys in a level or avoid traps. The themes though are interesting and Cube has a very nice and somewhat smoothing pastel look to it as far as the stage appearance is concerned. Traps and such though will remain in their colors no matter what the background or theme is, and this can either make locating them incredibly easy or, depending on the colors, extremely difficult. That’s part of the challenge though, and as you move farther and farther into the game stages, you will discover that many level become almost impossible and frustrating, but that’s what truly adds to the addictive quality.

Cube definitely is a puzzle game of a different color and shape. It’s a game that isn’t about points but rather, can you use your brain to accomplish something that seems like a simple task? Some believe they can, but that’s before playing the game, and Cube certainly takes a premise of getting from point A to B in a drastic direction that makes it fun, entertaining, and most important for any puzzle game, addictive. This is one instance where the squares are cool and hip, and if you’re a puzzle fanatic, you won’t want to be left out.

-mike-