When I played the first game in this set, I found myself wanting more at the end. It was a fairly easy game, but was over all too quickly. So when this game came up, how could I say no? I gotta admit, Im glad I didn't.
Story: The expedition has gone wrong... horribly wrong... and Amelia Cross is about to find out just how wrong it can get. You start the game with her as she collapses on a ruined landscape only to wake up in a hold cell of an unknown location. And while physically alone she isn't completely. Rather she is woken up by her com-set where a woman named Emma Sutcliffe is making a mayday call in much the same situation. She is a survivor of a mission to destroy an artifact from deep space before it can impact Earth. However success did not mean solid extraction as she is now stuck here too. Together, it will be your mission to figure out exactly where "here" is and how to get back home to the Earth your team had apparently saved. There is more to this story, but this is another game where explaining the story ruins the impact as it goes along... impact, if not content, for there really isn't a lot going on. You will basically be playing the game as you are told some details that hint at a much bigger picture and comes together nicely at the end, but when you look at what that picture entails, it really isn't a lot of content.
Still what is here works incredibly well for the game and really only comes to any issues at the end leaving (at least in my opinion) way too much open to interpretation, at least for one of the two endings.
Also to make it clear, this is a direct continuation to Q.U.B.E. in which you played an unnamed scientist who was sent onboard an object flying directly for Earth with the intent to destroy it before it can impact and destroy the planet, which is why Emma is no on your radio. I highly recommend playing that game first for this reason, but it is not necessary as long as you understand this.
6/10
Graphics: Q.U.B.E. 2 is an absolutely gorgeous title, taking the motifs of the original game and ramping them up with much more modern technology. Your world is still for the most part made of white cubes with rounded edges, but there is a lot more subtle detail. The world is not nearly as pristine and sterile as the first game, showing grit and grime as well as many of he cubes making the world you are being unevenly placed as if shifted by age. Paint is chipped with age and my god the lighting in this game just shows the lived in detail so vividly, it just all looks absolutely amazing.
There is even a hint of variety this time around beyond these touches, such as glimpses of the outside world or foliage occasionally growing into spaces long abandoned, and even some real moments to suggest story notes I should not be giving away here.
You will experience all this from a first person perspective as you navigate i with almost no interface to get in the way of the immersion, and yet in this case, I wish they had not included it for it was not needed. When you are in an area you can interact with you will always see your hands, which have tubes on the back and a dot on the palm, all of which glow with the color of the ability you have selected, making that square in the lower right-hand side of the screen who's only purpose is to show that same color and let you know incredibly redundant. You will be able to ignore it, and the whole game could have looked even better without it. Not that it's a huge deal and in fact it is a very very minor nitpick, but it is the only obvious improvement I could image making to this amazing looking game.
9/10
Sound: With any game where you never directly interact with any other character (friend or foe) but the environment alone, you can expect the sound effects to be fairly limited, and that is the case here, too. But at the same time, those sounds go a long way to creating the atmosphere of the game. From the first time you bounce off a blue square the last time you work a piston switch it all sounds great, complete with the echo of the stark environments taking it home. In fact, the bug I mentioned below was because I actually broke the sound while replaying this game and actually noticed it all missing as something completely wrong!
And the music itself, while not always there, is absolutely perfect to pull the mood out of scenes, usually when you first enter a room and even more in the closest things this game has to cutscenes... that's right, outside of one moment during the intro and the ending, there are not cutscenes of any kind at all. Rather this game takes a more "half-life" approach to story telling.
But of course the real star here is the voice acting, of which there isn't a lot. In fact there are only 4 voices in the entire game: Amelia's husband in the beginning, Amelia herself, Emma, and the other in the building with you. Everyone sounds absolutely perfect for their role, keeping out of the way of the game itself when not in one of the handful of conversations.
The end result is a small cast that stands out in the right ways and a game that sounds isolated between those moments as you climb through the alien domain you find yourself in, drawing on music to bring an extra touch of awe to the amazing looking world. It's absolutely brilliant.
8/10
Gameplay: And like it's predecessor, the gameplay is also a win here. When the game truly starts, it will introduce you to the rather simple control scheme and some simple obstacles to get you used to them. The left mouse button will let you turn the action tiles (white squares that stand out very well) any of the colors available to you while the right button will make them act. You will have three such colors available to you through the game: blue do not need to be activated, but anything that touches them will be launched the other way while red can be extended into a bar out of the panel and green produces a cube.
There will be other object the game will introduce you to as well, adding variety and a need for ingenuity to complete the puzzles ahead of you. But with these basic tools you will be prepared to get through every obstacle in your way! There is no moon logic here and puzzles will have you fiddling with potential answers to get you to the either the doorway you need to reach or the panel you are trying to activate. It's that direct, and the goals are that few, but each puzzle is unique and will not leave you bored figuring it out. This is absolutely a great puzzle game.
8/10
Bugs: While this game ran incredibly well on my hardware, I can not claim it ran perfect. But outside of some rendering issue I can only imagine existed because the game was designed to work with console as well (so it had the classic white space for a split second if you turn fast enough on rare occasion), there was exactly one moment where I hit a real bug after finishing the game and going back to see the other ending:
- What happened to the ambiance? After I finished the game, I was dissappointed to find my save game no longer available to see the other major ending. But that did not mean I had to start over to see it, but rather just the last three puzzles, which, now that I had just done them, would take mea couple minutes tops... so lets go! And that's when I hit this bug. I was no longer interested in hearing the conversation since I already knew what it would say and rushed ahead rather then listening before I began... and somehow broke the audio. From that moment on until I restarted the game, the ambient noises of the environment and half the actual sound effects (particularly events not directly committed by me in the game) were suddenly nonexistent. As noted, restarting the game fixed the issue, but my advice is to wait for conversations to finish before proceeding to prevent any chance of this occurring.
Score: Really good storytelling, great ambiance, and great puzzles combined with good physics and tight controls and you have a great game here. Bonus points for being a solid step up from it's solid predecessor and this is not a game to miss. Enjoy!
8/10
System Requirements:
- 2.5 Ghz quad core processor
- 4 GB RAM
- NVIDIA Geforce 470 or AMD Radeon 6870 HD
- 4 GB hard drive space
- Windows 7
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
Source: Steam
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