Review: Flow Cube
Score:
70%
Flow Cube is a logical puzzle game, with no timers, bonuses, or levelling up getting in the way. All you have to do is join up the coloured dots on the playing field. But unlike your common garden puzzle game, this game takes place in three dimensions...
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0.0
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
Right then, it's quick and easy puzzle time with your Windows Phone today, and I want to point out Flow Cube to you all. Some times I like my games to be complicated, where I need to plan ahead, think about the next move, and look at the layers of puzzling on offer, peeling them mentally back to find the answer.
But other times I just want 'cheese', and in the best possible way, that's what Flow Cube offers me.
The premise is a simple one that I've seen before on a number of games - you have a game grid, and on it are a number of coloured dots. You need to join these dots up with a continuous line, but you cannot have two joining lines crossing over each other. Yellow joins to yellow, red joins to red, but the yellow and red lines must not cross over each other. Run alongside, yes. Wind around each other, yes. But never cross.
What we have is a topographical puzzle game. It's the sort of game that some people will take a long time to play, but my brain can see the answers to each level rather quickly, which turns this into a fast food style frenzy of game playing. The twist on offer here is that the topography is in three dimensions. Rather than a square grid, the game area has been wrapped around the three visible sides of a cube. That opens up some different routes available to my mind, and different layouts of the so called 'standard' tricks needed (such as looping a line behind another coloured start/end point rather than go for a direct route).
Part of me wishes they had taken the final step and covered all six sides of the cube with a puzzle, but I think that would be a little too hard to visualise and manipulate on a mobile phone screen.
The interface is easy to use, just drag your finger from a point of colour (be it one of the end points, or a half completed line, and trace the route you want the colour to follow). While there's no way to scrub out a route, you can easily trace over it with a another colour, or use the master reset button to clear all the colours on a level and, in essence, start again.
Flow Cube is a free to play game, and is ad-supported. It's a touch annoying to see the same advert twice on screen (once at the bottom of the game play area, the second in the 'level complete ' dialog box). The adverts showing today (for UK mobile phone network Three) do take away from the design of the game and stand out a little harshly, but that's always the risk a developer takes with an ad-supported title.
And that's about it. Fifty fixed levels, with the next five uncompleted levels unlocked so you can always move on to another level if you do get stuck, and you'll likely burn through the game in a day or two of disjointed playing. But that's fine in my book, there's always space for titles like this in my smartphone - and there should be in your smartphone as well.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at