It’s quite a good feeling as a Nintendo gamer to see that the 3DS, which had a slow start pretty much everywhere in the world, is now doing quite fine, managing to hold its head high against its biggest competitors that at time of writing are undoubtedly smartphones and tablets. The eShop has now played host to a wealth of excellent titles, which even more surprisingly manage to sell very well! Coming off the back of the DSiWare that was, it has to be admitted, quite a mess… This all seems very promising for Nintendo indeed. 2011 saw the release of one little puzzle game that, while it didn’t seem like much at first sight, turned out to be a massive hit with players, selling well on the eShop and being surprisingly addictive. That title was Pullblox, or Pushmo for North American readers. A year later, a sequel has already been released in the form of Fallblox, also known as Crashmo, and that’s the game Cubed3 will be focusing on for the rest of this review.
Mallo, the hero of Pullblox is back again and this time he visits Fallblox park, where the creator of the puzzles from the first game has started creating a new kind of puzzles. Upon his arrival, Poppy, the creator’s niece, arrives in one of the most peculiar flying means of transportation…a basket like that of a hot air balloon pulled by dozens of coloured birds, holding the basket by a sort of giant perch attached to it. Mallo, intimidated at first by the cuteness of the newcomer, doesn’t dare to say hello. At the old man’s invitation, he struts his stuff by doing his sumo pose, shaking the ground like an earthquake, which scares all of the birds away. It’s up to Mallo to make up for his mischief now, by finding every single bird in the park, all of them conveniently sitting atop one of the new puzzles the old man created, giving him a good reason to solve them all.
Those new puzzles, the Fallbloxes, involve big blocks of different shapes, colour and size. Mallo can push and pull the blocks, like he did in Pullblox, however, those sitting on top of others may fall from their initial position as a result.
The goal is to create a path that Mallo can use to climb to the spot where the bird is quietly waiting to be picked up (no matter how much that block is shaken, which doesn’t make sense with the prologue of the game, but that’s video game logic at its best!).
These blocks can also have some special properties, like, for instance, an arrow-shaped switch on them that will make them move in the direction indicated by the arrow, all while the character is standing on it…or other blocks can have a cloud mark on them, indicating that these blocks will never fall from their height in the air, but can, however, be pushed around using the other big blocks around it.
More novelties make their entrance in this game and all of the special mechanisms, except certain kinds of switches from the first game, make a comeback, including wells of ladders and teleportation doors. The most obvious and visible change in the formula comes from the fact that the blocks can be moved in any direction this time, and the camera can be rotated around the scene to get a better understanding of the position of every block.
Actually, the 3D effect allowed by the 3DS makes even more sense here than it did in the first game, so it is an even better fit for the auto-stereoscopic screen of the system this time around. However, this makes for an overall more complex affair than Pullblox was. It is indeed more complicated to overcome a particularly trickier puzzle, since the range of possibilities is much broader now, with the third dimension added into the equation… As well, gravity irresistibly attracts blocks towards the ground, more often than not forcing players to start the whole puzzle again from the beginning. Sure, the rewind function of the first game that allows for some of the latest actions to be redone is still there, but the difficulty is a bit more unforgiving this time around to the point of having to restart the whole puzzle from the beginning more often than was the case in Pullblox. Thankfully, most puzzles were made shorter to solve this time around to avoid too much of the frustration that would otherwise arise from the repetitive nature that would ensue. However, Fallblox is still a slightly harder game on the whole.
The game even takes players by the hand a bit further than the first time to make up for the added depth and complexity. Puzzles can be skipped directly now, whereas in the past players had to be stuck for a while on one puzzle in order to be allowed to skip it and try the next one.
Just like last time, users can also share their creations online through QR codes. What is even better now, though, is that a PC is not required to get those QR codes holding puzzles created by fellow gamers! Indeed, browsing the Internet with the 3DS is possible, saving QR codes on an SD card directly from the web browser, and scanning them from the image files on the SD card to add them to the collection of puzzles within the game; a much welcomed addition to say the least. However, it seems like there still isn’t any way to “upload” your own puzzles directly from the handheld, which is unfortunate. It is hoped that – if Nintendo is to make another sequel – they will solve this issue by creating a dedicated platform accessible directly from within the game, for sharing brain teasing creations.
