Lumines Electronic Symphony (PS Vita)

I find it hard to believe that it's been 7 years since Lumines first appeared on the PSP back in 2005. Not being much of a puzzle gamer and having never played Tetris (say whaaat!?) I never expected much, but I went ahead and purchased it due to all the positivity garnered towards it. Since then I must say I've never looked back!

Lumines, pronounced Lu-min-ez and not Lu-mines like I believed it was for the last 7 years, is simple in execution yet extremely tricky to master. Blocks, each consisting of 4 smaller blocks of two colours mixed randomly, are dropped from the top of the screen and the aim is to match up small blocks of the same colour into 4 or more blocks of their own (following...?). Added to the equation is what the game calls the Time Line, which is basically a line that clears away all your formed blocks as it passes across the screen. Trust me, the principle is easy. Your goal is to ultimately score as highly as you can before the screen fills up.

What brings Lumines to life, and what the series is perhaps best known for, is the music. Oh, the MUSIC!! As you go about trying to reign as the ultimate Lumines King, the game's track list changes at regular intervals bringing with it new skins, new colours, new background visuals and varying levels of speed at which the Time Line moves and the blocks fall. Believe me, the combination of fast falling blocks and a slow Time Line is not a friendly one. The music is also excellently varied, from well known pop tracks to sweet, soft and mellow beats that makes you believe the world is a gentle place and that everything is going to be okay. That is until you notice your screen is quickly filling up and you realise what a nasty trick the game has just pulled on you. Not only is Lumines an excellent Puzzler, it's also a brilliantly evocative stirrer of emotions.

Avatars have always been a present, albeit useless, feature in Lumines since day one. Electronic Symphony introduces us to Avatars once more, only this time each avatar has it's own special ability to use within the game when things are looking bleak and your block busting stamina is wearing thin. These can be real life savers getting you through some of the tricker songs and back into calmer tides.

On the downside, Lumines offers little innovation from previous instalments and the developers have even removed Puzzle Mode (making pictures with blocks as quickly as possible) from the equation. This is only mildly disappointing and not something to be particularly upset about.

The price of the game is also certainly an issue. As great as Lumines is, £30 is asking a lot indeed. I strongly believe this should of been a PSN downloadable title at £15 max. The trophy list is also strong evidence of this. While full priced titles sport trophy numbers of up to 30 or 40 achievable trophies , Lumines has a mere 13 trophies with no PLATINUM. This is outright outrageously scandalous to a trophy hunter such as myself. Sad but true.

Of course, I wouldn't blame anyone for purchasing Electronic Symphony at this price, because it's an excellent game. Had the price been lower my score would of been higher.

Lumines is a block clearing game woven with a strong music driven setting and gameplay mechanic.

Unlike Tetris and it's various spinoffs, rather than trying to clear a line of blocks, in Lumines one clears (at least in basic terms) squares of blocks by matching 4 blocks of the same colour. In each Lumines level there are only 2 colours and each new tile is a 2 by 2 square with various combinations of coulrs. Having matched up four same coloured blocks to create a square, it does not clear immediately from the play field. Instead, a bar passes left to right across the screen in time with the rhythm of the track playing - it is the passage of the bar over a square that clears it and causes the pieces above to fall and reshuffle potentially creating further like-coloured squares that will clear the next time the bar passes. Timing ones squares so as many as possible are cleared by a single pass of the bar nets bigger bonuses.

Advanced players though will not worry about making squares and instead try to create long chains of connected blocks of the same colour. They will do this in order to use a special "Chain" block which will clear all blocks of the same colour which are touching. This technique can net massive scores if done right and allows faster progress through the game than clearing squares. Chain blocks are given as bonuses for clearing blocks but this is where Lumines' Avatar system comes into play - some avatars let one force the production of a chain block at a convenient time.

So this is what elevates Lumines above the standard block clearing game - there is a basic mechanic for clearing blocks by making squares, but that is not the optimal approach in terms of score/time, so the player is often trying to avoid making squares in order to get a bigger score later - thus Lumines has a nice balance between going for the chain block score and avoiding being forced into creating a block which will break the chain.

The game has Voyage mode (play though all songs), Duel mode (adhoc multiplayer only), Block mode (contribute to the worldwide block pool to gain experience), stopwatch (max score in fixed time), Master (basically a Tetris style game where block dropping gradually speeds up) and Playlist which lets one choose their favourite game tunes to play with. There's no direct online multiplayer though.

Graphically the game is generally good enough given that it's a block clearing game. The User interface is a little clunky and given the price set for Lumines I would have expected additional gameplay modes like puzzle, internet online etc.

Lumines was on the original PSP of course, but has been ported to many other platforms now. Even so, I think it is still best suited to a handheld platform like Vita so, as Lumines goes this is probably the best playing version available even though it isn't the most content heavy.

Given the price I don't think it is worth 5 stars overall - for more like £10-£15 then this would be a definite purchase. At £30+ it's a bit more of a difficult recommendation given the strong set of titles on the Vita. At the current price, this is probably only going to be sufficient value to people who already know and love Lumines (assuming they're not burned out on Lumines already!)

Lumines is a classic arcade game now. You make squares out of two different coloured blocks. It sounds simple but it really is hard to master.

The game can control by touch screen or using the buttons. You never have to select the option to use one or the other so you can mix how you like.

Presentation is beautiful. Each song has its own unique theme and background. Song selection is great - particularly like 4AM.

Many different modes available - Voyage plays through every song on the game until you eventually lose. There are no loading screen and the game beautiful transfers from one song to another. Time Attack mode where you can play either 30, 60, 120, 300 second periods. Playlist mode so you can only play to songs that you like. All modes par playlist feature leaderboards with friends/global and weekly/daily to see how you stack against other players.

There are RPG elements where you level up and unlock songs for playlist as well as Avatars that each have their own ability for single and dual matches.

Only main issue is that to use the Avatars ability, you need to get its rating to 100%. To do this you can build up blocks but it is slow. You can use the back touch panel to increase its rate but it makes the game much harder to control.