Cubicity: Slide puzzle Reviews

the game is fun and all but my issue is that i am unable to get the 'next time' achievement. i did two levels with 2 stars, on purpose, and then came back and got the 3rd star but i did not get the achievement still. am i doing something wrong or is there a certain time period i need to come back after or is it after a set number of levels maybe?

Good quality puzzle. Relaxing atmosphere. Pleasant music and cute animals :) Sometimes it is very hard to get 3 stars without special items.

I don't think the devs did enough play testing to figure out the least number of moves for each level. The 3 star move limit should represent the solution with the least number of moves, making the puzzle to figure out this most efficient solution. However, most of my initial solutions have been a couple moves below the 3-star limit. So, while there is a puzzle element of figuring out my initial solution, there could be even more puzzling by forcing me to figure out the most efficient solution. Still recommend on sale tho.

A cool short puzzle game. Don't believe the reviews that say it's impossible to have 3 star completion without power-ups - I completed all levels with 3 stars and 95% of them with "perfect" (it's an extra challenge, so basically 4 stars, idk), all without power-ups. It's definitely possible.

when it first came out, [b]cubicity: slide puzzle[/b] was full of mobile shenanigans, but based on feedback the developers quickly 'de-mobilized' it during launch week. it needed a few more patches to fix smaller issues and add some quality of life stuff like volume sliders, windowed mode, unlimited undo, etc., but now it's one of my favorite wall-to-wall sliding puzzlers. graphics are not really important in the grand scheme of things, even less so in puzzlers, but the diorama-like presentation of forests and cute animals immediately won me over, and I found small things like moving animals in the backround hours into the game. gotta admire the attention to detail. to be fair, scenery can get in the way sometimes, but you can rotate the levels (even with the mouse wheel now, thanks to yours truly, who asked for it), so it's not really an issue. audio-wise it's less appealing, I had to turn off the music pretty fast and wasn't a fan of the sound effects either, plus I have an especially low tolerance for gibberish. I'm fine with no voiceovers, but then don't make any sound either, no matter if you're a human, animal, robot or typewriter. no hard feelings though, not many puzzlers have a soundtrack I can listen to for long, let alone all the way to the end. as in any wall-to-wall movement game, your goal is to guide your characters to their destination, and based on the number of moves, you get a star rating. simply completing a level with zero stars won't unlock the next one, which actually doesn't happen often in other games, and you can go beyond 3 stars by completing the levels in even fewer moves, as many as the developers needed, but it's possible to do even better than them sometimes, which I can illustrate with a handy screenshot (I don't often get a chance to show off): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1732976849 star requirements are displayed on-screen while playing, another welcome thing, and you can even hide certain parts of the ui. gotta say again, for a mobile game it has some pretty good features other games could learn from. there are also 3 tools (bombs, teleports and ice blocks), a remnant from the mobile version. every level can be completed with 3 stars without them, but if you get stuck, using them can help you finish a tougher one. most of the time you're guiding an entire horde of characters, up to 8 or 9, but luckily not at the same time. still, it can take dozens of moves to complete some levels and with this many creatures, it's not that easy to streamline your solution. you unlock new characters as you go through the game, and after all the animals, various humans are next, with two more packs (cars and fantasy people) probably coming later with the promised extra levels. the difference is only cosmetic, but I found it really cool that upon restarting a level the game randomly picks from the unlocked characters. again, attention to detail, though I sometimes restarted on purpose because some animals look kinda similar, as cute as they are. and if you only have, say, 3 human characters unlocked and want to play a level with more than 3 units, the game automatically picks another pack. there's no keyboard support, but seeing as you control your guys separately, it wouldn't be very comfortable to switch between them with the number keys, etc. I also found it a bit heavy on resources. I played on ancient hardware, so it's not something to worry about, but puzzlers usually get along with firefox hogging all the available memory, of which I don't have much either, admittedly. or maybe it's just jealousy, since the main character in the game is a fox too. game mechanics include elevators, guiding arrows and teleports, the latter of which is maybe the only thing I have a problem with, but not a huge one. on some levels they are numbered, so you know which goes where, but on most they're not and you have to try them all. colors help somewhat, but some lead to dead ends, some can be an entrance to one and an exit to another at the same time. I guess it's part of the puzzle to figure out which to use, but then why are some still marked? either way, it's not a big deal. the game came out with 95 levels, but more are on the way with new mechanics, like lasers and push blocks. there was talk of releasing a level editor as well, not sure if it's gonna happen, but even with the current amount of content it's worth full price. it's cute, it's fun, it can be challenging, it's whole-heartedly recommended. there's a demo on the store page as well, if you want to try it first.

While there is a lot to like here, such as the outstanding visual style, cute characters, and the primary puzzle mechanics, I'm not sure if I should actually recommend this game. The problem is the 'power-ups' (aka cheats?): the ice cubes, bombs, and especially the teleports. They seem needed to solve some levels (at least for 3 stars completion), but because they are widely available (5 of each / level) they are completely overpowered. Why would you try to solve a level without them, when you can use them? It removes the incentive to actually solve the puzzles the hard way. It breaks the game. Shame. The achievements "use 'cheat X' 100 times" are completely stupid as well. This feels like a port of a mobile game, where the aforementioned power-ups are an IAP. I can't recommend that.

Like the game. Graphics looks really nice and the game itself is challenging enough. It has minor flaws, but it doesn't affect the experience. Glad that developer is working on updates and introduces new features all the time :)