Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Addictive, colourful and above all, just great fun!, 10 Mar 2006
By A Customer
As you've probably gathered, Lumines is a puzzle Game. A great puzzle game. It involves 4X4 squares dropping from the sky for you to make into 4X4 same colour squares. Sounds simple right? Its spiced up by a 'timeline' the sweeps across and deletes all your squares that you made up so its possible to combo squares into huge combos! Fantastic!Graphics: Well, they hardly push the PSP to its limits but thats purely because the style of game can't! There's only so much you can do with colourful squares but the backgrounds do look nice. Sound: This is the 'core' of Lumines oddly enough. The background music is mainly clubby. Although i do not like this type of musci it works well here. It works especially well when you make up squares because you can get a mixture of different sounds. So it is possible to chain up massive club sounds and that can be rather soothing after a hard day's work which is nice for a puzzle game because the genre can usually get quite frantic and brain busting Gameplay: Very simple, yet very effective. Place coloured squares into a 4X4 square of the same colour. Simple but insanely addictive. Learning Curve: This is very, very easy to pick up and play but requires skill, determination and dedication to master. The premise of making squares is easy but once you realise how important the timeline is it becomes as deep as hell. (hint: always think about what will be left behind after the timeline deletes your squares) Originality: It heavily borrows ideas from tetris and columns but the idea of music incorporated into the game is an original idea and works tremendously well Lifespan: Will last you forever. End of.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tetris for the Millenium, 3 Mar 2006
By A Customer
Arrange a series of falling blocks into squares of certain colour, by which you will prevent the sceen from filling up. Sound familiar? It is, borrowing it`s gameplay style heavily from such classics as Segas Cloumns and Ninty`s Tetris but adding to it a next generation spin of snappy visauls and pumping house music. Easy to play, difficult to master, just what these puzzle games are supposed to be about. Add to this a variety of modes and wi-fi multiplayer and you have a game that you will probably still be playing when the PSP2 comes out.Arguably the best title on PlaystationPortable. And yes, I do own Liberty City Stories.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lumines, yoowins!, 23 Feb 2006
All that fancy schmancy graphical power and the first decent game for the PSP is comprised of little more than colourful squares! Still, whilst not pushing the hardware to any extremes (though the video backgrounds are nice), Lumines shows that simplicity is king, by creating one of the most addictive 'puzzle' games since Tetris.
The familiar blocky premise sees you rotating 2-by-2 block squares, made up of either light or dark colours, as they drop from the sky, and forming 2-2 squares of same colour blocks to make them disappear. This is done to a sort of rhythm, as the lively, urban, techno, dance, electronica soundtracks dictate the speed at which the 'timeline' sweeps across the screen, taking all grouped blocks with it.
Once your brain gets around the mental conditioning of years of forming lines, and grows to accept that squares are what you want, the images start burning themselves into your subconscious, and each of the block combinations reveals its own technique and optimum placement. Once this happens, the game essentially runs on auto-pilot: you instinctively slide and drop blocks into place, racking up combos with barely any conscious thought. The challenge mode is the main game, recording your high scores; in this mode, the 'skins' (background, graphic styles and movie elements) change from one to the other, unlocking new ones as you go. There is only one sequence of skins, however, so you have to start back at the beginning for each try.
Lumines is a game that trains you well: whilst a score of fifty-thousand first seems unreachable, it very quickly becomes common-place, and before long you're disappointed when you fail to get four times as much as that. It's rare that I bother with scores, as they're just numbers, but Lumines somehow seems worth the effort, and every attempt (even when they extend to a couple of hours) is fun and engaging.
Two-player mode employs a half-screen nudging effect, which really gets the adrenaline pumping as your available space quickly fills up; and the puzzle mode is a twist on the normal formula by making you create specific shapes - despite these, Challenge mode is still the best.
There are a couple of pitfalls along the Lumines trail: for one thing, a simple mistake when playing can see your entire attempt thwarted, as polar-opposite blocks accidentally align next to each other. It's tough to clear them when this happens and you often have to rely on detonator blocks that delete adjoining colours. This screen-clearing effect is incredibly satisfying, but annoying when your need for one goes unanswered.
Another minor issue is the save/load bug that could make you delete your high score (as happened to me) if you put the PSP into sleep mode.
Finally, the random appearance of the four same-colour block pieces at the start of any game can unfairly skew your achievements by giving you undeserving bonus points (10,000 for a screen clear).
Aside from that, Lumines is fantastically absorbing, stylish and addictive - a great handheld game to get the console off to a strong start.
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