Thinking in 3D
Cube's particular style of puzzles is unlike anything on the PSP. Shame, then, that it has such a hard time running it.
Published: April 29, 2007
What's so great about Cube is that each of these elements are slowly spoon fed to you, giving you time to digest each part before throwing more at you. The pacing of the introduction of these elements is such that you're able to process their appearance in later levels without thinking too much about it, but you're not overwhelmed when they start stacking up in levels. It's a challenge rather than a burden, and when you factor in the fact that collecting all the keys in a level and racing to the finish requires a very specific route or moves, it becomes all the more intoxicating for perfectionists.
Alas, as soon as you start to really get into the game, those niggling technical issues become even more apparent. For starters, the camera isn't always the most helpful part of the game. It isn't until the halfway point where things start to really use all three dimensions of the puzzles that it becomes a problem, but even at the start it can be difficult for the game to understand what you're trying to do. Now granted, part of the fun is in rotating the camera 90 degrees with the shoulder buttons to get the best vantage point (forget using the analog nub, you'll just hurt yourself), but there are times where you're moving and flipping so often that you can get turned around far to easily.
I'm willing to overlook that part of things for the most part, though. The default, low-slung default angle can make things hard to see at times, but I think that may have been done intentionally -- not because it makes it more challenging, but just because the game runs like crap on the PSP. It's not just the framerate, which is bizarrely low for how much stuff on the screen (seriously, we're dealing with incredibly simple shapes here and simple skyboxes for backgrounds), but painfully long load times when you inevitably die the first couple times learning how to get through the level.
It's not just the visuals that suffer, either; the audio stutters while loading too, which seems to indicate the game was either sloppily coded or is streaming everything off the notoriously bad seek timed UMD (which, technically is kinda the same thing, I suppose). If the music didn't restart every freakin' time you did in a level, it would almost be tolerable, but the looping, slightly ambient, often percussive tracks aren't compelling enough to survive hitching, lurching fits and starts, nor repeated re-listenings a dozen times or more in a row.
So yeah, in short the presentation is crap. That doesn't mean the game is bad (in fact it's quite the opposite), but it seems more like the technology behind the PSP was what hindered it. I didn't mind the simplistic color palette nor the fact that some of the levels can seem a little similar towards the end. For me, it was the fact that the game ran like crap when it looked like it could have worked on the DS, visually. There's just no excuse for something this light on detail running like it does, and it merely adds to the frustration of something that could have been another sleeper hit from D3Publisher (much like the surprisingly awesome but also flawed [game=1483]Puzzle Quest).
Is it fundamentally busted? Nope, the way the game steadily ladles more complex challenges and puzzle grids that force you to think in three dimensions more or less cancels out the lackluster way it's all presented. It's just that in the process of doing that, it loses a bit of the oomph that could have made it that much better a title. Still, for what's here, this is a fantastic way to massage all that grey matter a little -- even if it'll give your blood pressure a work out at times too.
