It's $10 for a 2-hour game. The fundamental flaw with this game is that the developers were simply scared to let players have any freedom to explore or experiment. Which is to say that the whole premise is flawed. A Portal wannabe, this game lacks any of Portal's fun, both in the sense that I really, truly missed GLaDoS making the game hilarious as well as giving the game any sort ofIt's $10 for a 2-hour game. The fundamental flaw with this game is that the developers were simply scared to let players have any freedom to explore or experiment. Which is to say that the whole premise is flawed. A Portal wannabe, this game lacks any of Portal's fun, both in the sense that I really, truly missed GLaDoS making the game hilarious as well as giving the game any sort of context for what happens, as well as in the sense that simply pushing and pulling blocks isn't nearly as fun as running through a perpetual portal tunnel.
Even if Portal 1 constrained you to one solution just to teach you a new trick with the portal gun, you could still USE the portal gun wherever. The gloves in this game only do one specific thing on the handful of blocks specifically given to you in specific areas for you to accomplish your specified mandatory puzzle time.
When all you have are two to five blocks to push or pull, and you know that EVERY one of those blocks will be used, all the puzzle solutions become obvious. Even a few red herring blocks would have been welcome. What the game could have really used, however, would have been freer-floating blocks, and puzzles that actually use the character's relative position in some interesting physics puzzles (like Portal did) so everything wasn't just so scripted.
As a result, the developers seem to have quickly found out that they painted themselves into a corner, and couldn't keep coming up with new puzzles using the same block types, so they had to keep inventing new arbitrary block types or conditions. First you have color blocks you have to push with other blocks, then it's a ball. Then it's a ball on a slope with timed actions (annoying). Then you have to do everything all over again in the dark (REALLY annoying). Then some blue balls start wrecking the place for no reason (but you don't know if that's supposed to be good or bad for lack of plot). Then they start being suspiciously part of obviously pre-planned puzzles where they don't wreck things and move in set patterns to activate other blocks. Then magnet blocks. Then lasers and lenses. Then they forget the whole "blue balls wreck everything" concept entirely, and there's just rubble everywhere for no reason, even though everything still works. Then they super-charge your gloves at a Lego temple for some reason, and you can start changing the colors of different blocks (which would almost make you have to stop and think were it not for the fact that there are only 1 to 4 blocks you can change at a time, anyway, so there are still too few permutations to make puzzles challenging). Then the game ends in a completely unexpected, anti-climactic, and utterly confusing way because the game has no plot, and dumps you out to the menu screen because the devs couldn't think of anything more to do with their premise.
It's funny to see a game so utterly linear seem so utterly aimless. It just leaves me with the feeling that the developers discovered how limiting their game's premise was too late, so they just kept throwing new things at you every 5 minutes hoping that they could milk another 2 or 3 puzzles out of it before you got bored.
Plus the devs seem to spend an inordinate amount of time making you sit through cutscenes or walk in tunnels where the Lego structures jiggle in ways that cause them to clip through one another...
What this game could have really stood to try to copy would be games like Trine or Fantastic Contraption, where you DON'T have just one arbitrary solution to the puzzle. Fantastic Contraption, especially, rewards coming up with clever new ways to use the same tiny handful of pieces in new ways to solve new problems, or even to just go back and solve the old puzzles in a new way. When you complete qube, which only took about 2 hours, you never really want to go back, because there's no reason to do so.… Expand
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