Game Review: Enter the Q.U.B.E

Q.U.B.E Director's Cut has finally made its way onto the Xbox One. If this news surprises you then it certainly did me – I had never heard of it before it was advertised on the console e-shop. Apparently though, the game was first released in 2011 to much applause. However, last year it was re-released in a “director's cut” version with additional puzzles.

The premise is simple – you make your way from room-to-room solving various puzzles involving coloured cubes. Your character controls the cubes by using a pair of gloves. Usually the gloves only allow you to extract and retract the blocks into the ground or walls.

I have not played the original so I cannot compare graphics or the original gameplay to the newer version. That said, the graphics in the director's cut were crisp and bright most of the way through the game. I did experience frame rate drops a few times later in the game but not so often that I would be willing to complain about it.

The challenges do change with each section you progress through. For example, you have to move the cubes to influence the direction of a ball to help it reach a goal. 

There is another version of this later in the game but in the dark and some challenges also involve rotating whole segments of the room.

The puzzles start off fairly easy but get a lot more challenging towards the end of the game. I did not always find a consistency in the level of difficultly between challenges though.

Q.U.B.E has no multiplayer function but this is a good game to play with a friend. It's great fun troubleshooting solutions.

There are a few parts of the scenery you can walk through and get stuck on which is annoying. Considering this is a revised edition of the game there is really no excuse for this not to have been fixed.

Finally, I need to address the elephant in the room. A lot of people have compared this game to Portal because of its style. It is clear the developers drew inspiration from the series but there are no temporal-making guns to be found. 

Gameplay wise this focuses solely on blocks to solve puzzles and nothing else – so the game stands on its own two feet. But the developers could have used a different colour scheme or room layout to have avoided this comparison to the popular franchise.

Q.U.B.E Director's Cut gets 7/10.

Game Review: Avatar of the Dead

Hey all, between packing and moving house I've not had much time to review any books, films or games this last week so this is going to be a short one just to tie you over.

I have been playing Avatar of the Dead...or rather I played it twice and no more because it has no replay value. It is an indie zombie survival game you can get on the Xbox 360.

When you begin you get dumped in a dark map by a van with its lights on with no explanation as to how and why you got there. Armed with only your fists you are told to find weapons - which you will use to fight off zombies. I found a shovel and nothing else after that. The zombies come out of the dark but you can usually hear them coming and half of them look like crash test dummies. Then you hit them...again...and again...until they're dead.

This game wouldn't be so bad if the zombies took less than nine or ten hits to kill - yet yif you're hit more than three you die and have to start over (even though you're hitting them with a shovel).

Also the graphics are awful. If you try the punch attack it looks like you are swinging a pair of mannequin arms around. The shovel probably doesn't do much damage because when you swing it - and that term is being generous - it twitches and that's it. The map is very limited and the reason why it is so dark is not for atmosphere - it's to hide how bad the graphics are.

Avatar of the Dead gets 1/10.

Assassin's Creed Unity Review

It's November again and as inevitable as Christmas coming our way, Ubisoft have released yet another Assassin's Creed game. But why have one when you can have two this time? One (Assassin's Creed Rogue) is an Xbox 360 only game focusing on pirating and the other (Assassin's Creed Unity) is only for the new generation consoles, namely the Xbox One and Playstation Four.

For this review we will be focusing solely on the latter which is set during the French Revolution. For those uninitiated with the series, Assassin's Creed is a game series that follows the eternal war between two factions of humanity, the Assassin's and the Templars. You play as an assassin (yes, it's hard to believe that they're the good guys when I describe it like that).

In Unity you play as Arno, and orphaned aristrocrat (at least I think he is), who grows up to be a waste of space. But after being accused of murder and thrown into the Bastille, and learning of the Assassin's Brotherhood - who Arno's father worked for - you begin your life training to become a master assassin while trying to unravel the mystery of who killed your father and why.

Unity makes a welcome return to the core gameplay I loved in previous titles, namely the stealth and the endless freerunning over rooftops as far as the eye can see. More recent titles like Creed 3 and Black Flag scrapped this to focus the games on other things, but for me it always left the impression that both were missing something. Besides the reintroduction of all the freerunning though, there is not really much new weaponwise or movewise brought to Unity.

Visually you can also see a clear difference in the definition and detail between Unity and older titles. The detail on the buildings and the quality of the characters faces are most notable. Even very recent Creed games like Black Flag, which only came out last year, still suffered from what I like to call "cardboard box" head characters.

The multiplayer mode has had the biggest facelift. While playing the single-player mode you can join mini missions with either friends or random players. There is a wide range of different missions and playing them can really help towards upgrades to your character in the single player game. In previous games I found the multiplayer was often repetitive and got boring very quickly.

But sadly, besides the multiplayer, Unity has not really brought anything new to the table. This is a good game with great visuals and a lot of play in it, but it does rely a little too heavily on its core mechanics rather than trying new things. Like many other reviewers I really wish this game was held back in development for a few more months as the number of glitches it had on the first day of playing was inexcusable.

It gets 7/10. 

Hit the Dirt: Trials Fusion Game Review

Trials Fusion is the latest game to come out of the Ubisoft stable of the dirt bike racing series. Despite being set in a futuristic environment and a move to the next gen consoles, the core game play mechanics are still there. 

For the uninitiated, Trials is a racing game for one or more players on dirt bikes. While the game is 3D it plays as a side scroller, unlike other typical racing games where the camera is usually angled behind the vehicle of each player. 

The single player mode is enjoyable with a variety of different tracks. 

However, the game does begin to get very frustrating in the later stages as you must perform difficult tricks to progress over ever increasingly difficult obstacles. You can go without doing these stages but avoiding them means you cannot unlock and play the later tracks. I felt the trick reliance on later tracks was too heavy and it reaches a point when playing that the game’s simple racing style fun is replaced only by seething frustration.

There’s no doubt there will be people out there who have mastered the tricks and completed these stages but I found the monotony of doing the same tracks repeatedly to achieve this level too much personally. 

On the other hand, the multiplayer aspect of the game is just as good as it predecessors. It’s fun to watch the bikers hit obstacles, fail tricks and find ways to kill themselves at the end of each stage. With its simple controls it is a good game to play with the family or friends, if not as cute as Mario Kart. 

Track Creator also allows you to build your own tracks as well as play others. While it can be a lot of fun the internet is plagued with broken ones. These can be hilarious a lot of the time but I would not recommend playing them if you are a serious racer.

Game Review: Titanfall

As I’ve finally managed to scrape enough pennies together through hard graft and selling one of my kidneys to buy an Xbox One, this week I am reviewing new release: Titanfall. 

This game is a first person multi-player shooter which follows the story of two opposing factions set on far flung worlds and colonies. Actually, saying Titanfall has a story might be being generous. The campaign mode does kind of have one but there is very little to it besides some throw away dialogue before every stage. 

The campaign mode pits two teams against each other in different terrains and different missions. Sometimes your team wins by reaching the most kills target first and other times you have to hold certain areas for the longest to win. Unlike traditional campaign modes which are usually single player, Titanfall’s one is multiplayer so you will need an internet connection. Once you complete the campaign mode as one of the forces - either the IMC or Militia - you can then replay it from the opposing side. 

The developers clearly bypassed story to focus on game play in Titanfall and it has paid off. The controls are very easy to pick up but it takes practice to learn how to best approach every fight. There are a lot of places to hide, a lot of stealth and also giant robots. Yes - you get your own giant robot to run around in. However, these are not always available and are not invincible, so again, it takes practice to learn when best to go on the offensive and when to retreat. 

My only gripe with the campaign mode is that it does not matter whether your team wins a stage or not. You still progress to the next map regardless of the previous match’s outcome, which kind of makes campaign seem a bit pointless. That said it is still immensely fun. 

Titanfall also has a classic mode - which is a strange word to use considering this is the first in the series. But regardless, there are several different types of matches you can play here. Unlike campaign mode you can choose whatever game type you like. My favourite is Last Titan Standing. The graphics are also crisp and smooth, making the game a great visual piece of eye candy.

Titanfall gets 7/10