I wouldn’t consider myself a “casual gamer” by the traditional sense of that description.  I’m more the “I like what I like” gamer.  It just so happens that I’ve downloaded and liked a couple casual games lately and I wanted to spread the word about one of those games today.  The game is Cuboid from Tik Games and Creat Studio and it’s available on the Playstation Store.

Check out my full review, after the jump.

One of three games Creat Studios has released on the Playstation Network recently, Cuboid is a puzzle game that may seem the slightest bit familiar for fans of Roll Away (or Kula World as it’s also known in Europe.)  Solving puzzles on tile-based floating platforms littered with switches was a welcome sight I must say.  I’ve been waiting for ages to get Roll Away as a Playstation Classic to play on my PSP and to date it still hasn’t been released.

As you start out the game, your task is to rotate a 3D rectangle (formed by taking two cubes and fusing them together) around a series of intentionally shaped floating levels.  You cannot dangle your cuboid off the tiles in any way or it falls off and you need to start over.  The goal is the same in every level, to slide your cuboid into the glowing blue goal end-first.  This almost sounds like a metaphor for adolescence but trust me, it’s much more forgiving than that.

The game progresses nicely, introducing wooden tiles which can hold the weight of one half of your cuboid per tile, but not the entire thing.  This means you can position your cuboid on its side with one half on a regular tile, one half on wood, or both halves each on their own wooden tile, but you cannot stand on end on a wooden tile or it will break.  There are also switches that flip platforms into play, toggle switches that flip platforms up/down, switches that require the weight of both halves of your cuboid, splitters that divide your cuboid into separately controlled cubes that rejoin when they come into contact with each other and more.

Most levels are of the “do it the quickest and/or the least amount of moves” type, but there are certain levels that start out with a maximum number of moves and each move you make decreases the number of moves you have left.  You can pick up +10 Moves bonuses to give you more moves but these need to be handled strategically because it may take you more than 10 moves to get to the bonus, negating its use.  Once you’ve played the game a while, a quick trip to the online leaderboard will fully deflate any sense of accomplishment you have as you’ll see your quickest times halved and your fewest moves scores quartered.  The top scores typically have an average of around 3 moves per second which just left me scratching my head.

All in all, if you watch the preview video on the Playstation Store about the game (and kudos to Sony and Creat Studios for supplying preview videos to their game right in the store interface) then you’ll know what you’re in for.  There’s no hidden “It looks bad but it’s really fun” aspect to this game.  If you like that type of shape manipulation puzzle game, you should like Cuboid.  If you don’t like what you see from the preview, chances are nothing in the game is going to change your mind.

On the horizon, it looks like upcoming DLC will be bringing additional levels, additional trophies, a level editor, and custom soundtrack support to the game.  Price and release date are still unknown, but since the game only runs $9.99 to begin with, my money’s on “Free to $2.99″ as the likely target, but don’t quote me on that.

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