Review:
Rubik’s Puzzle Galaxy: RUSH - WiiWare Review

Rubik’s Puzzle Galaxy: RUSH

Widely considered the world’s best selling toy, and having sold over 350 million units worldwide, the Rubik's cube comes with a fearsome reputation. It would seem foolish for anyone to attempt to replicate the cube's brilliant simplicity in a video game format. Well Two tribes have done just that with Rubik’s Puzzle Galaxy: RUSH. Not only have they taken on the challenge of somehow reinventing the cube, they have (on the surface) succeeded. Rubik’s Puzzle Galaxy: RUSH is in essence a fun and entertaining puzzle game, with easy enough levels to entice younger audiences, but also some seriously challenging conundrums for the more hardened puzzle gamers.

To achieve this, however, it was obvious that the game must stray away, to an extent, from its minimalistic 3x3x3 roots; this is accomplished with some neat gameplay which basically consists of the player directing cubes to their destinations with the use of arrows and a considerable amount of brain power. However, this is not all there is to consider. Aside from the basic arrow tiles, which simply change the direction a cube that rolls over heads in, there are also tiles that speed up or slow down cubes, a stop sign that makes them stop for a brief moment, conveyor belts that do not change a cube's direction but simply push them one space to the side, and splitter tiles, which will alternately send any cubes that cross in one of two directions, in order to space them out a little and/or separate different colours.

All of these methods of moving your cubes make for an, at times, complex brainteaser with cubes rolling around all over the place, leaving you at a loss of what to do, until a random combination of tiles sends the cubes tumbling neatly into their allocated spaces. Watching these colourful blocks fall neatly in place leaves you with an enormous sense of satisfaction even on the occasions when your not quite sure how you have come to your seemingly genius solution.

The game is presented in a cartoonish 3-D style which hardly stretches the Wii’s capacity for graphics, yet feels just right. The fundamental nature of the game is obviously not in its lifelike visuals or in depth story modes, but in its addictive, easy, accessible gameplay that can be painfully difficult one moment and then tremendously rewarding the next. These simplistic graphics, coupled with a catchy soundtrack, make for a pleasant experience that (at first) young and old can enjoy. Once you progress to the medium and hard stages of the game however, where the puzzles take a great leap in difficulty, many casual gamers will be left behind; the harder levels truly are not for the faint hearted and will leave all but the deftest puzzle gamers utterly bewildered.