Well this my first review after having a week in bed not able to move a muscle, and the only good thing that came about this was the fact I lost over a stone. I think I should be sick more often. But sorry, where was I? Oh yeah! Q.U.B.E. Now this game I had seen before on Steam but I got the Directors Cut on Xbox One: the all in one entertainment system. Sorry, I won’t write that again even though Microsoft asks we write that every time we talk about the Xbox One.

 

So I guess the lazy but easy way to describe what QUBE would be to say Portal but without the jokes. Now, I was in the very small minority that just could not get into Portal, I loved the comedy but for some reason just could not get on with the gameplay and puzzles. Here, QUBE does some things better like an overarching story that keeps you wanting to finish the next room/puzzle and see what happens within the story next.

 

The game looks nice but nothing stunning. All very clean futuristic whites again, very similar to Portal, but here the puzzles don't seem to ramp up in difficulty quite as much as Portal and the only puzzles I had real difficulty with was some of the colour coded one's where you had to drop say a green ball into a green pit. Now, this might sound easy but when you are colour blind this is very trial and error and you are just hoping that the pit is indeed green and not orange or yellow (I had to write down the order of colour so I could pass through to the next puzzle).

 

So this is a cheap indie game and this is very much in favour of Q.U.B.E as the game is not very long but then again neither was the Portal games and sometimes a 3-5 hour game is perfect. I really do feel that this style of game is perfectly suited to only a few hours as that way nothing gets repetitive or feels over used.

 

I had no technical issues with the game and the only tiny problem I had was that sometimes the game seemed to not have much in the way of anti-aliasing so sometimes the objects do get the dreaded jaggies. But the game is a very low budget indie game and we all can't expect GTA V production values. All that matters is the fact the game plays really smooth as for me it's better to have a smooth frame rate as this makes things all silky smooth.

 

Going back to the graphics, I know I said they are nothing special but for some reason all the lab style whites and glassy shine on everything help make the game stand out against all the greys and browns of say a Call Of Duty game. I don't want to go into any depth for the story as this is the main reason to push on getting deeper with the puzzles. But the way you interact with the walls and blocks is great and feels nice. If I was a designer on the game I would of pushed the game to have a lock on to the object that you want to interact with as on some of the harder puzzles the view movement was just a little too fast and I went past the object that I wanted to move. This was made even worse on the hard levels. If you are not dead on with your timing then you might have to start the puzzle all over again.

 

But in summing up we have an almost perfect game with only minor gripes but I can't hold too many against the game or developer as I guess been colour blind is not a high enough factor in normal society. But other than that this is a great game and I for one would easily put it above Portal as the gameplay and puzzles just join together in a much tighter fashion.