Review: Lumines (PSP)

The premise, as with most puzzle games, is simple: blocks fall down from the top of the screen and it's your job to line them up with other blocks in order to make them disappear and hence not pile up enough so that you can't drop any more. In Lumines, the blocks are always 4x4 squares, and only ever consist of 2 colours. By moving and rotating these squares, the player must combine them into other squares (as opposed to the normal 4 length lines or a solid horizontal one as in most puzzlers) to make them vanish.

The hit here, though, is Lumines' links with music. Produced by Tetsuya Mizughuchi, the brains behind Space Channel 5 and the sublime Rez, Lumines embraces the interaction between light and music as much as possible, no more crucially than the constant scrolling laser that passes by the screen once every 4 bars. Although you are free to line up your squares at any time, they will only vanish if they have been caught in the beam as it passes, and not until the end of the 4 bars. If the current music track is slower, then, it's clear to see that you will be able to line up more squares to vanish in the one go, hence a larger combo value.

As with Rez, everything you do creates music (and in some cases, light) - put the headphones on,get into the groove, and the game suddenly transforms from above-average puzzler to a work of pure genius. The main challenge mode takes you through a series of ever changing 'skins' - these have their own distinct visual style and music track, both of which evolve over the course of the level. Struggle with your blocks and the music loops, waiting for you to progress the game, but play well and the whole thing flows beautifully.

Pretty much everything in Lumines unlocks more and more skins; there are (tough) time trial challenges for those wanting a shorter burst of play, great news because it's entirely possible to play Challenge mode for upwards of an hour, but there is also a versus mode which can be played against another player via Wifi, or the PSP itself in a furiously paced head to head. There's even a substantial side challenge, dubbed Puzzle mode, which has you placing the blocks to match up with an image pre-determined, a little like the similar mode in Polarium.

Visually the game isn't doing much that the Gameboy Advance could do, at a superficial level, but there's so much going on and the aesthetic styles are so distinct that we suspect the huge storage space on the UMD was a main draw to having the game on the PSP. There's also (naturally) stacks of music, over a huge array of genres, and although most of it is electronica and not to everyone's taste, there's some serious Japanese talent behind most of the tracks and hearing new skins is a constant delight.

Lumines offers a solid challenge, with decent graphics and some great music, but it's the addictiveness that's the real selling point - it really is that life-devouring. There's little else like it just now on the PSP too (with the possible exception of Puyo Pop and Mercury) so puzzle fans really don't need to look any further. Us, we'll have to finally put it down, as there's a big pile of other PSP games that we've not even opened yet...

Rating: 8 / 10

Words by Alex Carroll