Xbox.com describes Death By Cube as an “exhilarating action game in which you must take out endless hordes of enemies, while avoiding the rapid barrage of their fire that envelopes the screen”. The key words here are “rapid barrage” and “fire”, and the missing words are insane, impossible and smashed Xbox.
I know twin-stick shooters are supposed to be hard but this game sets a new notch on the bar of difficulty. Left stick to move, right stick to shoot, nice and simple, and the same as every other game in the genre. What the game does differently, or at least to my knowledge, is allowing you to dash with LB/LT, creating a clone of yourself to distract enemy fire, and pressing RB/RT to summon a shield that sucks up enemies bullets and fires them right back at them.
But simple controls does not equate to a simple game, quite the opposite in fact, as Death By Cube throws a relentless amount of enemies at you. You have your standard enemies, which are cubes of course, that simply run towards you with the intent of exploding. These are fairly easy to deal with but again the amount increases the difficulty. When you throw in shooting enemies then the whole thing becomes a horrid laser filled mess.
The nice enemies will simply shoot straight at you making them easy to avoid and take down, but the not so nice ones, the ones that like to spin creating arcs of bullets spanning the entire grid-like level, those are a little annoying. Annoying, yes, but still fairly easy to deal with. Instead of building upon this, Death By Cube just throws hundreds of each variety at you at the same time. Excellent players with ninja-like reflexes might be able to deal with this onslaught, switching between dash and shield, dealing death like nobody’s business, but average players like me will have no chance.
I like to think I have good gaming reflexes, as well, but this is something else. I think they tried to create something that has depth, requiring quick changes between the power-ups, but in reality it left me running round the map spamming the buttons in a frantic hope for survival.
I was only able to get 6% through the game, and that was not entirely from my own merit, but by using the credits I had earned to buy access to the later levels so I could see how things changed. And change they do, by giving you a base to protect as well as bullets to avoid and enemies to kill. I managed the first level after three tries but the second one was beyond me. The problem with these levels is the task of keeping you alive as well as the base; you have to soak up the bullets that are hitting you, but it is impossible to get the ones that go past you, hitting the base and quickly destroying it. Similarly, taking time to shoot the cubes that are trying to bash the base opens you, and the base, up to enemy fire.
The games visual style is nice, albeit bland, with the levels being different shaped white grids and your character, a little robot, variating in colours while the enemies are different shaped black blocks. Clean and simple, until you kill an enemy and fountains of blood cover everything around it. The first question: why do cube shaped robots bleed? It’s odd. It does make the levels more interesting but it quickly disappears returning to the bland white. The games menu’s themselves are cluttered and confusing, needing a lot of patience to work out; if only they had continued the clean and simple level design here.
Maybe if you give the game lots and lots of time it would become more friendly, but as it stands it’s far too difficult and flawed to be a rewarding pick-up-and-play arcade game.
VideogameUK verdict: 3/10
