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7.4 excellent
Did you ever see that horror movie about some people trapped in a huge cube filled with deadly cube-shaped rooms? (I forget the title... it was a Canadian movie if that helps.)
Exocubes, by Gameeel Entertainment, is a game about a blockheaded stick figure, named Cubert (no relation to Q*bert), who wakes up in a similar deadly maze of Tetris-like rooms. If you hate colored bricks as much as I do, then you'll find Cubert's predicament particularly horrifying. He's enclosed on four sides by walls, and rows of colored bricks are steadily filling the room from the ceiling. If I was in Cubert's situation I guarantee you I would fall down dead of a heart attack. Only the wall underfoot (AKA the floor) is weak enough to be destroyed. Thus it's the only escape route. If you can help Cubert destroy the floor, he'll drop down into the next even more deadly room. Then he must escape from that room, etc. Freedom is just forty rooms away (nine rooms away in "classic" mode). But if the colored bricks overwhelm the room, Cubert is a goner.
Gameplay involves using the mouse to drag individual bricks up or down in their column. (Only up or down - you can't move them left or right.) Every few seconds, an energy field scans the room, starting at the floor and making its way to the ceiling. If it finds an exposed match of three or more same-colored bricks in a row, either horizontally or vertically, those bricks will separate from the rest - along with any bricks below them. They'll smash to the floor underneath, weakening it. (The sound effect is deafening.) The key is that at least one brick in the match must be exposed... a match in the middle of the pile won't be scanned. However, matches can be stacked on top of one another. Matches directly above previously scanned matches will also be scanned and dropped.
It's hard to grasp unless you see it in action. If you really want to understand the gameplay, you'll have to either download the Exocubes demo. Or hallucinate the gameplay by battling Tetris three hours without a break, then eating two large sixteen inch jalepeno pizzas. You'll hallucinate something similar to Exocubes, I bet.
As the floor is weakened by your bombardment of colored bricks, cracks will appear in it. I'm not sure why dropping bricks onto the floor deteriorates it while allowing an entire column of bricks to fill the length of the room and press against the floor causes the game to end. That's one of the big mysteries of Exocubes. Soon the cracks in the floor will lead to bits of it crumbling away, and finally whole sections will be demolished. Every last bit must be gone before Cubert can drop down to the next room. (He's skinny but he's got a big block for a head.) Unfortunately, it's very difficult to gauge how many more bricks must be dropped on a section of floor before it will crumble completely away. That makes the game quite trying when bricks are piling up and you only have time to make a few last ditch matches before the room is overwhelmed.
By the way, the floors in these rooms aren't just normal Kirkcaldy linoleum kitchen floors that you or I might track mud onto or slide a fluffy cat across. They sometimes behave in baffling ways. For example, in some rooms pieces of the floor move back and forth. That means you have to time your brick drops appropriately, which is challenging because the scanner determines when bricks drop. Sometimes pieces of the floor teleport to other positions. (This is particularly tricky because they don't rematerialize instantly.) Sometimes a cannon is embedded in piece of flooring. If it gets disturbed by a falling brick, it fires an energy beam upwards, destroying bricks. (Nothing wrong with that, though it occasionally messes up plans you've made for a match.) Sometimes the floor acts in combinations of these strange behaviors.
As you might expect, there are special bricks as well. Padlocked bricks cannot be moved. Some bricks are bombs which explode when made part of a scanned match, destroying the bricks around them. Sayonara bricks! Some bricks are partially petrified, and must be matched before becoming completely petrified. Some bricks speed up the scanner's sweep of the room, which can be very handy, and occasionally annoying. (It takes time to set up long chains of bricks and if the scanner is sweeping too fast it will hit your match before it has been completed to your satisfaction. If you've ever tried to set up a complex line of dominoes with an agitated squirrel skittering about the room, you know exactly what I'm talking about.) Color changer bricks change all the bricks of their color to a random brick of another color. And there are more!
This is a great game for Tetris fans. You'll be challenged to complete all forty-nine rooms and save the cube top, squared off, eight corners, ninety degree angles, flat top, stares straight ahead, stock parts, blockhead Cubert.
Exocubes is flashy, with nice plasma effects when bricks explode or are scanned as matches. It's well designed and there are quite a number of different background songs to enjoy. Some match the gameplay more than others, but it's nice to have a bit of variety when fighting for an android's life in a maze of deadly rooms. Oddly enough, the programmers included a graphic equalizer on the game screen (and it even does its graphical equalizing with the music muted). It's as if they were attempting to send the game back in time to 1993. The only big annoyance I found with Exocubes is that you have to be quick with your mouse to make matches. The bricks can lower unexpectedly. If you've grabbed a brick and are dragging it up or down, and all the bricks lower just before you release the mouse button, the brick won't be in the spot you expected. I lost several levels in just this situation... because shamefully I'm not good at dragging bricks quickly with a laptop touchpad. If I was Gameeel, I would have kept the mouse relative to the bricks while dragging is in process.
Hi! - The movie you’re thinking of is called “Cube” - go figure!