Developer: Two tribes
Category: Puzzle (Logic)
Released: Dec 2010
Usual Price: £3.49
Hours Played: 3
Controller Compatible: No
Rating: 0 Stars
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Menus, Progress & Stats
The main-main screen gives you four prompts to either "Start" the game, "Select" or "Delete" a profile, or to "Modify" settings. On hitting "Start" you're taken to a large glowing orb surrounded by five block-like structures. These are: Tutorial, Bonus, Easy, Medium and Hard levels. Once the six tutorial levels have been done the easy mode is unlocked. On hitting the "Easy" levels you are taken to a level-select screen which gradually get filled with 20 structures that each represent the levels. Those surrounded by a fuzzy glow have not been completed, those without have. I think I would have preferred a list so that progress is easier to follow rather than the random jumble in place.
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Unlike the more fun and whimsical Sheep's Quest, Rush makes you plan the placing of arrows and suchlike before the blocks are set in motion. Much like Puzzle Dimension, you may hold the right mouse button down and drag across the screen to get full rotation of the 3D view and see the play area from any angle. This is very well and robustly done and lets the player have that feeling of freedom and being in full control. The play area consists of a kind of maze made up of white blocks. A small number of these are made up of pulsating solid squares of varying colours and show the ghost of a cube of the same colour springing out of it. This is to show the cubes' initial path.
Elsewhere on the play area there are white squares that are framed by the same colours. Your task is to guide the blocks to those squares by using various tiles such as arrows, stop-signs and conveyer belts that you place on the play area during a kind of "build stage". Once tiles have been placed and you're happy with your set up, you click on the tick in the corner and the cubes are set in motion. (They turn right if they hit a wall by the way.) If they crash or if any fall off the edge an exclamation mark appears and you restart and try again. If they all make it to the destination it's onto the next level. With just one solution, Rush will appeal to those out to solve a mathematical problem rather than those who want a fun and less taxing, enjoyable puzzle.
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Conclusion
On a personal level, as one who likes to get engrossed in a game that is fun and enjoyable and that has achievable goals (for most half-intelligent people), I would hesitate to recommend Rush. The reason is that I'm already struggling on those early levels and find the effort to arrive at solutions too much like hard work!
However, it does happen to have a really good hint system. In the bottom left there are two icons. One has two cubes that, if clicked on, show you which placed tiles are correctly laid down and which are not. The other, with three cubes, shows you which squares need to have tiles placed on them in order to achieve success. This works really well, making the game more accessible and helps noobish players to get more out of the game than they otherwise would. Using them does not punish you however; you are simply told how many times you used the hints after successful completion.
Overall, colours are fairly pale but they are bright and vibrant. The music on the other hand, reminding me of the awkwardness of that used in Lumines, is pretty unmelodic and bland. Unlike that game though, it's not really as important and therefore not as noticeable. Apart from its nasty difficulty, I'm not keen on having those structures glow and not glow at the level-select screen to indicate if levels have been done or not as it's a bit confusing to know which is which sometimes after a long absence from the game.
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