Rubik’s Puzzle World

One of the hardest puzzles around has now made its way to the Nintendo DS and the Wii. Is it as fun as the 1974 classic cube?

One of the hardest puzzles to be seen in the world is the Rubik’s Cube. Invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, the Rubik’s Cube has been one of those puzzles everyone has seen with over 300 million Rubik’s sold as of 2005. But with the game Rubik’s Puzzle World, gamers can attempt this colour-coordinated 3D block without having to lug it’s rotatable self around.

The colourful world of Rubik’s Puzzle World seeks to be something of a spirited place as the three-dimensional world dances around you and lets you select things with ease. The colours are great and the sound isn’t too bad, the only thing letting you down being some sense of cheesy music that you can thankfully turn off in the menu.

Equipped with both single and multiplayer modes, the main point of Rubik’s Puzzle World is obviously to solve puzzles that come from the almighty cube. Our favourite randomly-coloured blocky friend is there as well as some other games, but it’s probably best to talk about the cube to begin with.

The main puzzle mode allows you to solve a Rubik’s Cube in a 3D simple world and can be entertaining if you’re already someone who finds this compelling. If not, Rubik’s Cube offers an interesting lesson to show you how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. One of the more cooler parts of the game, this idea will help you to understand just some of the ways the Rubik’s Cube can be beaten.

If that’s not enough, Rubik’s Puzzle World tries to be inventive by allowing you to play with not just the Rubik’s Cube but other games inspired by the puzzle. You’ll find a variety of puzzle themes that feel like they’ve been inspired by other classic titles such as Breakthru, Columns, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, as well as a few others. The games all serve as decent casual fun but won’t give you much more entertainment than that.

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Strangely, it doesn’t have the lasting power of something like Tetris DS, an update to Nintendo’s classic version of Tetris that brought the block dropping title into the 21st century. While it does have extra puzzles to play with, they’re not on the same level that Tetris has as Rubik’s Puzzle World’s games are really just variations of one type of game without a whole lot of difference.

It’s in this way that you can’t help but feel that the developers have managed to create a game that manages to get in the way of its own sense of fun. Rubik’s Puzzle World is not the sort of simple puzzle edutainment that it probably should be and while it can be entertaining, it can be easily dropped for something more worth your money.

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Developer: Two Tribes
Publisher: Funtastic
Platforms: Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii
Rating: G
URL: Rubik’s Puzzle World