Review: D-Cube Planet

Developer: Gameshastra

Publisher: Gameshastra

Puzzle games seem to be a staple of the minis service, so here we have D-Cube Planet, a block-shifting puzzler from Gameshastra. A little alien has crash landed his ship on D-Cube Planet, with ship parts scattered all over. It’s your job to move blocks and clear a path for him to recover the parts, rebuild his ship and continue on his way. A simple concept, you may say, but you’d be wrong, as D-Cube Planet has some fiendishly tricky levels up its sleeve.

Each level gives you a board with a number of cubes on it blocking your path, with your aim to shuffle the cubes around and give your alien friend a path to his ship part. You only have a certain number of moves to accomplish this and to complicate matters further certain cubes can only be moved in certain directions. D-Cube doesn’t reward anything less than a perfect (or near perfect) set of moves, with gold and silver medals awarded for completing the levels in the perfect number and allotted number of moves, respectively. Going in all-guns-blazing will do little more than force you to restart the level, so patience and forward planning is the key to progression.

There are three difficulties to play, each altering the amount of sadism present in the levels. Even if you’re playing on Easy the difficulty ramps up fairly sharply, so playing on Hard is reserved for hardcore puzzlers only. There are 40 levels for each difficulty meaning there’s quite a lot on offer here, but it’s all virtually identical. The gameplay is always the same, with a complete lack of special moves, cubes or any twist at all. As you progress the only thing that changes is trickiness of the puzzles so it can all get very boring very quickly.

Visually it’s pretty neat, but as with the rest of the game it lacks any sort of variety or flair. You’ll be presented with the same background level after level without any change, and little else happens (outside of the puzzle) apart from a flying saucer or shooting star passing by every-so-often. The audio is somewhat lacking, too, with the same mix of weird and wacky sounds and noises repeated in each level. After a while it’ll grate your nerves and you’ll be reaching for the mute button. The controls are simple (analog nub or d-pad to move the cursor and X to select the cubes/alien) although there’s a definite lag, especially when moving the alien around.

Overall, D-Cube Planet is merely a satisfactory puzzler. With 120 puzzles over 3 difficulty levels there’s quite a bit of game for your money, but unfortunately it’s all just too similar and lacks the flair to raise it to anything more than above average. If you’re looking for a casual, fun little something to pass the time and get the brain cells working I would suggest you look elsewhere, only die-hard puzzle fans need apply here.