CROSSNIQ+ Reviews

good puzzler

Crossniq+ is a cool game to just chill out to or test your skill in efficiency and quick thinking. It's not the fullest experience but is certainly fun. The game has pretty simple gameplay of just trying to make crosses. There are a few main mechanics, the 2 special kinds of tiles and the ability to move multiple tiles at once. Once the difficulty gets high, the tiles will make the game extremely difficult and you'll have to be as quick as possible to come up with a plan to get everything in place. There's the main endless mode that continuously gets harder, the time attack mode where you have to get a high score in 1-5 minutes and then finally a chillout mode where you play endlessly without a time limit on a stylized grid with relaxing ambience. All the modes allow you to choose the number of tiles you wanna play with, 6x6 up to 16x16. You don't get additional time it seems on endless if you play with such a big grid though, so it feels unfair and I suggest you keep to 6-10 tiles. There's also the versus mode but it's likely that you won't play it. It has the most complexity with items and special rules that allow you to hinder your opponent. However, the only way to play it is with local co-op, no online play. The other big aspect of the game is the small selection of characters you interact with. You get someone to help you out in the tutorial and then have the museum worker and a shopkeeper. The museum character, Cal, stands out because he talks with you the most and is the key to completing the game. You earn money when you play in endless or time attack. You can donate to the museum to unlock new pieces of artwork to play the chillout gamemode on. In the shop you can buy items for the versus mode and more importantly bonus music tracks to play with. This game has an ending, or a credits screen. To see it you must [spoiler] completely fund the museum by donating to Cal and then talk to Vi, the shopkeeper, to see it. Fully funding the museum and buying everything from the shop will also unlock new lines of dialogue. [/spoiler] This game is pretty cool, but I feel like it could be much more. The biggest issue with the game is that it has a lot of extra characters that get wasted because they're only used for the versus mode. This should really be the type of game where you play against these characters in some sort of campaign, similar to Puyo Puyo. Instead, the main gamemode is the endless mode which is less complex than what a campaign with the versus mode gimmicks would be. This just makes the game feel less full and is kind of disappointing. Also, there are a few smaller issues: The game has stylized Y2K interfaces but there are a lot of animations that look cool but just make getting through the menus take longer. You can't see the amount of currency you have outside of the shop so you have to go to it and sit through some long animations. You can't switch the music track you have on when you choose to retry so you have to quit and then change it once you play again. You can choose the colors of the tiles you play with but they reset every time you boot up the game. The music in this game is great, as per expected with Y2K games. The themes you actually play with aren't very distinct from each other ( Except for Mosaiq which is a really cool one ) but they are all nice and chill. If you aren't interested in playing the game, then you should at least look up the soundtrack and listen to it. Overall, it's a cool game that one can definitely have a good time vibing with. With how much content is here though, there are probably better puzzle games that you could consider buying. It seems to be more of a passion project from one dev, so I guess it's fairer for us to just appreciate all the cool things that are here.