Against the first QUBE, this was a step up, but not by much. The most obvious would be the visuals. Unreal Engine has really done some great work on this simple puzzle game that makes the colours and environment really pop; it's slightly surreal but the entire game is meant to be. Another merit are the puzzles. One thing that most puzzle games fall trap to is when they run out of ideas, they start to throw in cheap tricks like that 0.1 second you need to get that absolutely right. The first QUBE actually fell into that trap; spoiler alert: If anyone recalls, they actually forced you to memorise positions of cubes by switching off the lights. That's cheap. QUBE 2 luckily doesn't seem to fall into that issue. They have very basic ideas, sometimes a little too simple, but they didn't try to make it really difficult. Unfortunately, the aforementioned point is a double-edged sword ... because as to save themselves falling into the trap, they really did run out of ideas, and the puzzles are relatively easy. The game took me five hours to chew through and a good 40% is walking and listening to the odd narrative. That brings me around to the other flaw...the story. It starts off interestingly enough. Just you and a lady on the radio. Quite familiar with Portal or the first QUBE...but then it gets dull quite fast. The story is pretty flat and if it's meant to push you forward, it fails. The voice acting is rather good, if you ask me, but it lacks the humour of Portal or any drive to grind on. Another thing is that the physics just don't check out. The toughest part of solving the puzzles is trying to accept that just maybe, while it shouldn't, that's the way it should be done. The object interactions are weird. The real issue for me: No Level Select. Start over or nothing. Pretty big oversight here! Especially with alternate endings. It's a flawed game, but I wasn't too disappointed. Don't go in with high expectations, and you may actually enjoy this game quite a bit.
