Platform: Xbox 360 (XBLA)
Developer/Publisher: Premium Agency/Square Enix
Genre: Twin-Stick Shooter
Verdict: Death by Cube attempts to innovate and expand on its predecessors in the genre, with often mixed results.
Pros: Demands a strategy that other twin-stick shooters often don’t; world-based progression is fun to play through; great soundtrack and surround sound usage; the dash mechanic is brilliant
Cons: The shield mechanic is equally as frustrating as the dash is brilliant; survival mode is unbalanced; most of the upgraded robot models are of limited utility
Acquired: Download Code Provided
Price: 800 Microsoft Points
The twin-stick shooter has a specific archetype: the Geometry Wars model of a lone fighter in an arena, one joystick to move, the other to shoot, and a collection of enemies trying and kill you. Every other game in this genre is largely attempting to either emulate or improve on these basic tenets. Death by Cube is the latest attempt to try and do the twin-stick shooter in another brilliant way by introducing new game types, progressions, and mechanics. Sometimes Death by Cube succeeds in doing just that, but it just as often fails, and is quite frustrating in its attempts to do so. As such, this becomes a game that is frustrating in its inconsistency on its path to potential greatness.
Death by Cube’s rudimentary story has you playing as a robot who’s searching for his lost memories. Apparently, you begin to regain your memories by destroying ominous-looking black cubes. I suppose it makes more sense than the story of Geometry Wars, which is…wait, what was the story of Geometry Wars? If the utter lack of story to Geometry Wars was what was keeping you from loving the twin-stick genre, then you can’t add the Microsoft Dollary-doos to your account fast enough and buy Death by Cube. It has infinitely more story by comparison, even if it’s limited to short enigmatic blurbs after clearing all of a robot’s levels.
Which brings us to how the game is laid out – you have more to do than just shooting enemies for as long as you can. There are 7 robots with their own worlds and each have levels with missions to complete for money to upgrade your robot and to unlock new missions. If you’ve played Geometry Wars Galaxies, it’s essentially the same concept. The difference is that there are 5 particular types of missions:
- Destroy All Enemies: As stated in the title, your goal is to destroy all the enemies within the time limit.
- Survive: You have only one life, and must try to score as many points as you can on this one life. These levels are usually inhabited by one particular type of enemy, so they sometimes serve as a sort of training against that enemy type. These levels are the most similar to the classic Geometry Wars style, and also tend to be the most challenging.
- Protect Your Bases: These levels give you bases that you must keep from all being destroyed by invading enemies. You can heal your base by coming in proximity to it.
- Destroy Enemy Bases: Instead of protecting bases, you have to destroy the bases. It’s not all about destroying the base right away – you’ll need to kill enemies trying to protect the base to rack up points and increase your multiplier so you can get the medals for the level.
- Destroy As Many Enemies As Possible: These levels are populated by boxes with exclamation points on them that explode if you destroy them when you’re too close – in order to increase your multiplier you’ll need to get as close as possible and/or kill other enemies in the level to increase your score and multiplier to get medals.
All of these missions have bronze, silver, and gold point award tiers, and achieving each of these gets you more money. The upgraded models are ones that have various other properties, like one that is optimized for attacking and defending bases, and one that has spread shots. In fact, those are the only 2 that you should really worry about, as understanding Death by Cube’s gameplay and its quirks will teach you why those 2 models are the only viable ones.
Where Death by Cube starts to differentiate itself is in its dash and shield abilities. The dash gives you a quick flash in a specific direction, stunning enemies in the radius of your dash, and leaving a decoy image behind to fool enemies temporarily. This stunning is a major key to success, as it can slow even the most powerful enemies in their tracks and allow you to get close enough to dangerous enemies to increase your multiplier. See, your multiplier increases by killing enemies in close proximity to you (signified by the score you get for killing the enemy appearing in blue text with a star next to it). In modes where the enemy count is limited, there’s a lot of thought and strategy that goes into making sure you get a high enough multiplier to achieve a certain medal tier. The dash is a very powerful weapon to help you accomplish this, and in chaotic situations, to help you keep your head while all about are losing theirs.
The other ability you have is the shield, which, well…let me try to explain: Death by Cube loves the shield. Death by Cube wants YOU to love the shield. Death by Cube will occasionally throw you into bullet hell in order to get you to try and love the shield. Unfortunately, Death by Cube just doesn’t realize that the shield is wholly ineffective. You hold down RT/RB to call it up, and as soon as bullets hit it, a 3 second countdown begins before you have to release the shield; by holding down the right joystick in a particular direction, you can send the collected bullets in a specific direction, and you can hit LT/LB to dash with the shield as well in order to advance faster.
The bullet launching is largely underpowered and useless, and in particular bullet hell situations, you’ll be taking a lot of damage from the enemies still firing their bullets at you, and the shield has a short recharge time. Oh, and the dash when using the shield doesn’t make you invincible, so instead of stunning enemies, it just damages you. Just brilliant. The bullets are overpowered as well – for the number of bullets that the game throws at you, each individual one does far too much damage. The shield is largely only used when the game basically mandates that you must use the shield because otherwise you’ll die.
Speaking of useless, only the Spread and Base Master specialty models are worth your time. Base Master heals your bases very fast, and starts off with homing shots, that can help with warding off pesky enemies that come in at you. But the Spread model is the model that turns into a jet and bombs the Russians like a boss. See, the Spread model is a lot like the original Contra – very powerful because its shots spread out in a wide arc. And these shots don’t suffer from much, if any loss of power due to them being spread shots, for whatever reason. This means that you can easily kill multiple small enemies at one time, or be hitting single enemies with multiple shots at one time. Oh, and with powerups, the spread shot can be upgraded to a an arc of nearly 270 degrees. The dash and shield work well enough compared to other models, as well. The Spread model is so clearly the ace of this game, that spending time and money trying out other models is just a waste. This model is even more powerful than the more expensive ‘upgraded’ Extreme Shooter model. It’s ridiculously good to the point of unbalance.
Unbalanced describes the difficulty of this game as well. All the modes besides Survival are generally pretty easy – you have multiple lives and a life bar to manage, so surviving and mastering these modes is generally just a test of time and skill improvement. Survival is where things get really tricky, because with only one life, you have no room for error. And many of the survival levels deal with specific enemy times only, so this is an extra-strong cocktail of frustration. Like, oh, having to face only tiny enemies that are also land mines. Or legions of enemies with big face-melting instant-kill lasers. My game progression is littered with completed levels, many with silver and gold medals, but uncompleted survival levels. Frankly, many of them are just plain unfair for what the bronze medal requirement forces you to do, and demand absolute perfection. It’s funny, if you think about it – the one ‘traditional’ mode in Death by Cube is the one that works the least.
Which is to say that Death by Cube is different – and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The dash mechanic, the proximity multiplier, they work. The levels that force you to implement these tools and actually think about what you’re doing more so than just playing in a constant panicked survival mode, they are where this game shines brightest. When this game forces you to use its poor shielding mechanic, when it tries to be a purely fast and frantic game like Geometry Wars, it tends to fail. Death by Cube freely experiments with doing something more to the twin-stick/arena shooter genre, and it can be appreciated for that. It’s just hard to appreciate this game for its failures, when it does work poorly. It has the innate fun that genre brings, and it’s as good as the elite twin-stick shooters when it’s at its best. When it’s at its worst, you’ll want to put it down and go play something else. Death by Cube is inconsistent. Approach it with caution, knowing there is entertainment here. But there is also frustration with what could have been as well.
The controls are pretty simple to grasp. The left analog stick controls the ships direction that it is travelling, the right stick controls which direction it is facing, much like every other dual stick shooter. However it’s not as fast paced as a game like Geometry Wars is. Shooter is more methodical and makes you think about your movement more than your shooting. Firing your weapons is done by hitting either the R1 or R2 buttons. A simple tap of either button will fire a single shot, as fast as you can pull the trigger. If you hold down the button you will get a stronger missile to fire. The more of these you let loose, however, the faster your heat gauge will go up. If the gauge gets too high, you burst into flames and the only way to save your ship is to hope that you land in a nice cooling puddle of water. Missiles aren’t the only manner of weapon you have at your disposal, though. In later stages you find ways of equipping your ship with water and magma “suits.” As the name would suggest, you can shoot either water or magma as your primary weapon with each respective suit. These will help you in solving the many environmental puzzles within Shooter. Along the way you will find gems and scientists to pluck from the cave floors. This is done by simply tapping either the L1 or L2 buttons. Doing so will send out a grappling hook like tool that will pick up said person and place them safely in your ship. Later, you can use the hooks to do other tasks.
The game looks very slick. Granted, it is very simplistic, much like the other PixelJunk games, but it still manages to portray the stylized feel of their previous titles. The fluids in the game are where Shooter probably shines the most. Everything flows the way you would think it would in real life, making it easier to pick your targets in the game in order to solve puzzles. The bosses are very large and for the most part fun to interact with, though as I said before this game really isn’t all that hard. Music doesn’t really play as much a part in this release as it did in Eden, but it’s still here, however muted it is. The sound design is pretty fun as well. Weapon fire, environmental noise, even the screams of the people you are trying to help all subtly add to the overall feeling of the game. Few things in this game make you feel as helpless as when you fire a rogue shot only to hear a scream off screen, and know that you just killed someone completely on accident that you were supposed to have rescued.
