Wii Fanboy Review: Art Style: Cubello
Okay, so WiiWare is overrun with puzzle games. The download service is really the perfect venue for simplistic, single-screen games such as falling block puzzlers, and developers know that. The hardest part is coming up with the concept for the game, and then the work can be done on a small budget. For that matter, Nintendo hasn't even had to worry about coming up with new concepts -- they've got plenty of puzzle games in their past to remake.
It's a surprise, then, that Nintendo and developer Skip have introduced a brand new game in the Art Style series after only one remake. Cubello is a bit more of a traditional game than Orbient, but it's still worthy of the Art Style moniker -- and the interest of WiiWare puzzle fans.
Cubello is sort of a 3D Bejeweled variation: you fire colored cubes at a structure floating in a white space -- an effect, by the way, reminiscent of early PlayStation 3 advertising -- and any group of four or more adjacent cubes of the same color falls off, causing the rest of the cubes to move in to fill spaces. However, unlike Bejeweled, you have a limited queue of cubes in your "magazine," which is replenished whenever a successful match is made. Also, the structure, called a Cubello, is constantly spinning and slowly approaching the camera. The force of shooting a cube at it will cause it to spin around, and eliminating blocks will push it back away a bit. Occasionally a slot machine onscreen will award "bonus time," in which you have an unlimited magazine of the same color blocks to rapid-fire.
The game is made up of a series of stages which end when you've cleared all but a single "core" block. Soon after starting, an "endless" mode becomes available in which stages are presented one after another until you run out of cubes to shoot.
Cubello may just be about matching four blocks of the same color, but considerable strategy is required. The stages are designed in such a way that strategy is possible -- shooting certain areas of the structure will create chain reactions, or help bridge two areas of the same color. More importantly, it takes planning skills (that I do not possess) to ensure that you aren't simply shooting single blocks of the wrong color as the stage winds down. If you have one white block left on the stage and there's a black block next up in your magazine, you basically have no choice. Careful planning can help ameliorate that and keep you from prolonging the stage. For normal folks like me, though, it just means that many stages end in frustration.
The scarcity of shots, combined with having to wait for a certain part of the structure to turn back around before you can shoot at it, as well as the slow looming, help bring tension to a puzzle game that, without the forced scrolling and rotation, may have been too simplistic. The music, a constant mechanical, beepy theme, and the ridiculous synthesized voice narration help add to the tension. The voice, a constant robotic play-by-play ("LAUNCH LIGHT BLUE, LAUNCH BLUE, LAUNCH WHITE, ELIMINATED, LAUNCH BLUE, ELIMINATED, EEEEEEEEEND") may end up contributing to tension between you and anyone else in the room, so while I thought it was hilarious, you are advised to "enjoy" Cubello's sound with caution.
Orbient was a Game Boy Advance bit Generations game remade admirably on the Wii. But Cubello, more than just being a new bit Generations game, is a new bit Generations game that works better on the Wii than it would have on the Game Boy. It needs 3D, and it needs the pointer. It maintains the simplistic look, simple gameplay, and electronic music of the bit Generations series, while being a perfect fit for the Wii. It portends well for the future of the series on the Wii that this is more than just a rejected GBA game.
Final score: 7.5/10
