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.