Welcome to my first video game review for Doux Reviews, and as my modus operandi is to review unusual and obscure things, I have chosen a personal favorite game that personifies both criteria. I only found it about by random luck on my Steam feed and seeing a couple indie YouTubers like Olexa and Retromation cover it and picked it up. Its normal price is only $7.99, and it’s been on sale for just over $6 more than once, so even if I didn’t love it, it wouldn’t feel like a waste of money. But considering how much fun I’ve had with it, it feels like a steal.
The name isn’t particularly descriptive of what playing the game is actually like, but it also rings 100% true. Cubes and chaos are definitely involved here, although with the game being 2D, the cubes are more akin to squares, but the principle remains the same. It’s a single player game where you are making your way through a map, dealing with each node that you decide to move into on the way to complete your quest to reach the end boss, defeat it, and claim victory. This journey starts off very linearly in the tutorial but does open up very quickly, and then there are special scenarios to try in addition to the normal game mode as well.
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| Can't get much more linear than this. |
While the tutorial again limits what you can play as and slowly introduces your abilities as it unfolds, once you are done with it and continue to play you will unlock more classes, species, perks, curses, game modes, and of course cubes, for future games. You can only be a dwarf priest at first, but your choices will quickly balloon from there as you play. The choices are a bit different compared to what most people are likely used to. While you will have dwarves, warriors, wizards, and priests, you also will have some strange species choices such as chaos, devourer, and shadow, and odd classes such as the engineer, pyromaniac, and programmer. The combo of species and class you choose will determine your starting perks and cubes, which can then be further modified once you start playing with the ever-increasing level of nightmares you can opt to use to increase challenge and variety.
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| This is what maps generally look like. Note the life hearts on the bottom left. |
Barring perks and curses, which are mostly good and mostly bad effects respectively, and terrain, which will change the makeup of the battlefields we fight on, everything else is a cube. Not only is that anthill you just placed a cube, but the ants it periodically spawns are also cubes. The bullets fired by that rapid fire gun and the rapid-fire gun itself are also cubes. The dwarven warriors, strange crawlers, catapults, and even instant spells are all cubes. How the cubes you and your AI opponents use interact with each other, the battlefield, and curses and perks in play can change dramatically from one play to another and can include some very odd situations at times. For example, most spells are 0 health cubes, which means you place them, they do their thing (heal, zap enemies, destroy a cube below, and so on), and then immediately die. If you have a perk that causes your cubes to spawn with extra health, you can end up with a bunch of low health cubes that just get in the way. Most cubes will fall down if they aren’t already placed on top of another cube, so these spells, which you will generally place up in the air so they aren’t in your way, will plummet downwards and make low health obstacles that can jam up your forces, but can also slow down the enemy at times, and then there are some cubes and perks that can mess with gravity and flip this situation on its head, and some cubes fly or can be made to fly as well.
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| Wandering curses normally have 0 hit points, but here they live on, and make a right mess. |
You will spend the lion’s share of your time in battles. Even if you consistently use the options to speed up time, and once you’re familiar with the game you likely will, you will be fighting a lot, and some fights can take half an hour or more. You can save your progress while on the main map, and most runs aren’t going to be that long anyway, but some combinations of all the various effects and difficulty levels can create some very long battles, although there is an achievement for winning a battle within the first second, don’t expect such short battles often. Despite all the possible permutations that can occur for battles, they all start with your leader and available cubes on the left side of the screen, the opposing leader and their available cubes on the right, and curses, perks, and statistics below the battlefield. Any consumable perks that work in battle will be displayed down below, and you can simply click on them to use them, although you may have to scroll to find what you’re looking for once you’re deep in the game, as the curses and perks can become quite numerous.
Once the battle starts, and I highly recommend going into your game settings and having battles start paused so you can prepare right away, both leaders will start with some mana, and begin generating more mana immediately. You will use that mana to pay for cubes as they all have a cost, even leaders have a cost (although it’s 2000 and that’s mostly for paying for other effects). Usually your maximum mana is 100, but that value matters for a lot of other cube effects. If you reach your mana cap and don’t use it, you will take mana burn damage based on how much over your cap you are, so use it before this happens! The AI can also suffer from mana burn, but it’s only in extremely rare situations. You will then place your cubes on your side of the battlefield, while your enemy does the same on theirs. Some cubes and abilities defy this placement requirement, while many cubes you place will end up moving towards the enemy to attack or spawn cubes that do so.
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| It's not just an anvil, it's a comedic anvil! And yes, it can really hurt if you drop it from a great height. |
The objective in all battles is simple: defeat the enemy leader(s) while keeping yours alive, and the enemy is striving to achieve the same thing but in the opposite direction. The side that finds itself lacking any leaders will lose. You will usually only have one leader per side, but this can be changed via class selection, perks, curses, and cube abilities. I’ve had situations where dozens of leaders were in play, and usually not to my advantage, making it difficult to eke out a win, but those are rare, and generally you want to focus your ire on the angry blue cube on the right of the screen.
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| Who ordered the zombie horde? |
There are many ways to reduce enemy cubes, and hopefully the enemy leader, to 0 health, but the enemy will be trying those same ways on you. Warriors can march across the map to attack in melee, eyes will randomly zap enemies, lasers and other guns will fire across the map at each other, various cubes can be placed so that they debuff and damage enemies that walk over them, mortars fire arching projectiles across the board, water will drown enemies beneath, lava burns anything nearby, and so much more. The battles are where cube chaos truly earns the chaos portion of its name, and especially on higher speed settings, although thankfully we can pause and slow it down as needed.
If you win a battle, you will be given some gold and you will be able to acquire another cube from a selection of random ones made available to you. If you lose, you lose a life and if it’s your last one, or you were in life debt, which can only happen via events, you lose the run. Boss battles occur at the end of each map past the initial tutorial one, and bosses not only have special shields, but they often have some nastier cubes to use against you as well. Gold is used at shops, forges, and for some special abilities, and you can even go into debt by allowing your gold to go negative, but that has consequences...
Besides the battles, you’ll encounter many other nodes in your travels. These nodes include cursed battles, which use the same crossed sword icon as normal battles, but the swords are red instead of gray. Cursed battles add a curse in effect for that single battle only and also increase the rewards for winning. There are also perk chests that let you simply select a new perk to use, cursed perk chests that do the same thing but also cost you a life, question marks that represent random events, scales that give you perks and curses in equal measure, skulls represent the aforementioned boss battles, the forge and shop options appear after the boss fight for the current map, giving a choice between upgrading items in your inventory, or purchasing things from the shop, and the far end of your journey on a map, the vortex, leads either to the next map, or the end of your run.
If you successfully reach the end of your run, that final vortex allows you to either declare victory and end it, keep going via starting over and advancing through another map, or take on ‘impossible challenges for no reward.’ Regardless of what you pick, once you reach this screen, you will end up with a victory, even if you eventually succumb to the ever-increasing difficulty or those challenges being too tough to beat. Win or lose, you gain XP to unlock new classes, species, perks, curses, cubes, menu options, and scenarios, although you also can keep leveling up long after you’ve unlocked everything as I did quite a while ago. If you lose a run, you will still gain some XP which scales with how far along you were when you lost. Unlocking new things that can alter how you play is always fun, and there are a lot of things to unlock with hundreds of cubes and even more perks and curses for us to discover. The myriad of updates to the game has expanded this even further, and more stuff is on the way. We just got an update not much more than a month ago that adds a new species, the remnant, that forces very different play as any cube you place that normally charges at the enemy losses that charge ability, but gains hit points, making warriors and things like fireballs feel odd to use, and more is coming in the future.
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| My Chaos Engineer living up to its title with this thing. |
My only real complaints are mostly minor. Wunarg (the developer) sometimes has odd ways of writing how things work, and while this has been improved to a great degree, it can still trip you up when the language of some of the more arcane cubes can be difficult to decipher or a critically important comma is missing. You will sometimes have runs where you are progressing well and suddenly hit a brick wall where the AI’s cubes and abilities counter yours to the point that you can’t win. Finally, you can also get runs where so much is happening that the game locks up and you have to use the task manager to get out of it. I find those small prices to pay for how much fun this game is. The graphics may not win many over, but for me they are functional and nostalgic, so I don’t consider them a negative, although I’m sure some will. They remind me of my Commodore 64 days, and that’s never a bad thing.
The game is currently in early access, but it gets new patches continuously, and I have over 300 hours in it already, so I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth. I normally advise folks to avoid early access games more often than not, as some games never leave that state, but between its low price, constant updates, workshop support with some interesting mods, and the sheer amount of enjoyment this game brings, I heartily recommend it.
Four chaotic cubes out of four.
-One of my favorite and strangest games was one when I was undead as my species, which means that when my cubes die, they have a chance to revive as undead versions of themselves. Combine that with some bullet making cubes and a perk where any time your cubes move forward, they have a chance to make downward bullets as they travel, although downward bullets cannot create more downward bullets. I then proceeded to create hordes of bullets, downward bullets, and undead versions of those bullets. The screen was a constant swarm of bullets of various kinds, which was visually confusing, but extremely enjoyable, and not pleasant for my AI opponent.
-One thing that can be quite fun is sealing my forces in with various walls and then casting water portals like mad to watch my enemy succumb to a constant deluge of water and the damage that causes. The AI sometimes tries this as well, but I tend to be better about sealing my forces away, and the AI will slowly drown itself while my leader sits behind a wall of various cubes.
-Using the rogue class’s ability to slowly claim the enemy side of the screen, one cube space at a time, and then drop nuclear bombs right on top of their leader. Rogue isn’t my favorite class, but it is up there thanks to tricks like this. Since they also start with the poison kit cube, where enemies that take damage also get poisoned, and poison causes damage over time, this combo of dropping things on their heads and stacking more and more poison can be extremely effective and fun.
-Playing as the engineer and using the class perk to tinker with my cubes, in which I can combine them with each other and then combine the combines for as long as I can afford to do so, and then take simple cubes like the humble bush with its modest health but high regeneration, and combining one or more of them with stuff like laser tanks and death knights, can create some powerful attacking cubes, has been a blast.
-I mentioned mana burn before, and you can start battles with too much mana to the point that you can quite literally start the match and immediately lose. I had this happen from a perk that sounds great, and now comes with a warning after several of us experienced the pain this mostly beneficial perk can bring, in which having more gold starts you with more initial mana, but this doesn’t increase your maximum, so the consequences can be painful, even fatal, before you can even start to spend it.
Morella is a Gen Xer who likes strange things a bit too much.
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