Q.U.B.E. Director’s Cut Review: A Puzzler That’ll Definitely Test Your Critical Thinking

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The latest port from Grip Games comes in collaboration with Toxic Games and brings the latter studio’s “brain-twisting first-person puzzler” Q.U.B.E. to consoles. Find out what we thought of it in our Q.U.B.E. Director’s Cut review.

Story

The story within Q.U.B.E. Director’s Cut is pretty simple and straightforward. At the beginning of the game, you find yourself waking up from some unknown incident and a mysterious voice informs you that you are an astronaut inside some kind of alien structure hurtling towards Earth. The voice then goes on to guide you and instruct you on how to use the gloves you are wearing to manipulate blocks in order to make your way through the various chambers. Oh, and in case you were wondering Q.U.B.E. stands for Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion.

Gameplay

Like the story, the gameplay itself is straightforward – but don’t let that fool you. Red, yellow, blue, purple, and green blocks are manipulated in different ways to help you cross through into the next room. Using one glove will pull, push, retract, or otherwise interact with the blocks while the other will perform the reverse function. Red blocks will extend or retract, yellow blocks can be used to create stairs, blue blocks retract and then act as a spring when jumped on, purple cubes will alter the room, and so on.

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The game starts off fairly easy but quickly becomes more difficult as you progress through the 7 sectors, requiring you to think and interact on the fly in order to successfully complete the current chamber puzzle. Some rooms require you to move yourself across while others require you to find a proper path for a ball to open the next area. Later on, some of the chambers become dark except for certain blocks requiring you to use your memory in order to make your way through. Overall, the game is a nice mix of physics-based challenges, 3D jigsaws, and platform-based trials.

A new time trial mode, Against the Qlock, has also been added to the game and features 10 levels you must complete before the timer runs out. You can also compare progress on the leaderboards and track your time played and number of moves you’ve taken in the gameplay stats section.

Graphics

The graphics are fairly basic, but that suits the style of the game just fine considering you’re manipulating blocks and room environments in order to progress.

Sound

The sound effects are decent and the background music doesn’t get annoying as can happen in puzzle type games. Most of the time the background music is just sort of there in an ambient kind of way and doesn’t distract from your thinking through the puzzles. The voice acting, which was added to the Director’s Cut was well done.

Concept

Even though Q.U.B.E. Director’s Cut is a port from the original Q.U.B.E., the concept is still pretty good. One thing that I would have liked to have seen, especially with the Xbox One, is Kinect support. The gameplay style would suit it considering you are only using two gloves to interact with everything and it would have been neat (in my opinion) to be able to interact “directly” with the cubes via the Kinect.

Wrap-Up

If you like puzzle games, Q.U.B.E. Director’s Cut is an affordable one you’ll want to check out. While it starts out easy, you’ll be challenging your thought process in no time at all.

***We were sent a review copy of Q.U.B.E. Director’s Cut on the Xbox One for the purposes of this review.

Last Updated on November 27, 2018.

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