Recent reviews by Dom

The game is really early in development but looks really promising. I've been following the progress on the official Discord and am hopeful for the future. If you're willing to put up with the game being rough around the edges and very low on content go ahead and buy it now. If not, definitely come back later when there's more meat on the bones.

Very disappointing.

I want this to win the "labour of love" award for this year's Steam Awards. That 25th anniversary update was crazy and proves it deserves it.

Edit: turns out no one agreed.

Very difficult game at first but at around 400 hours it's possible to beat the hell boss once every 2 or 3 runs.

Great game. But it just chugs you right into the action with no real tutorial. Soundtrack is lit.

This game is great. The things I liked:

- Core gameplay loop of exploring, mining and returning to town is amazing.
- Movement is tight. You get more and more mobility as the game goes on.
- Optional post-game is short but fittingly difficult.
- The game looks great and runs well.
- It's possible to sequence break and doing so is pretty fun. The game even encourages it with an achievement.
- The upgrade system is well-made and it's fun to interact with it and see the small bonus effects you can accumulate over time.
- The game is really good about explaining a new gameplay concepts with the simplest puzzle it can come up with before having you solve the real puzzles. Example: It will put you in a room with a mine cart and the only way out is to smash it. The game teaches the cart is smashable before you need to smash them for the puzzle in the next room.

The things I disliked:

- Going back to town after making progress in the story and seeing all the towns folk have "..." above their heads always felt bad. The "..." indicates that they have new dialog. It's such a slog having to read their dialog. It's not well written. Also only 2 lines are shown at once so it's a chore to click through it all. You can't just spam your way through it, you'd miss the story!
- Once you mine everything the only way to make money is to farm enemies and it sucks. It's not a fun grind.
- 100%ing the game's achievements requires 2 or 3 playthroughs.
- The game's short. 14 hours to beat the story and find all the secrets and collectibles.
- 99% of the time the game is consistent about its rules so it almost never feels bad when a secret is hidden too well. The thing is: like 2 or 3 times a secret is something like: break a block that's not breakable in every other situation but is breakable here.
- I like the music but it can get repetitive.
- The story between the main character and their companion sucks. They're friends in 2-seconds and never talk to each other. At first, it seems the companion is there to act as a hint system but there's only like 5 prompts in the entire game to talk to them.
- A LOT of the story in this game is dependent on knowing the events of the first game. This game explains the main points; that "Rusty" was the main character of the first game and he was really important but all of the finer details are not present.
- It feels like one of the plot-lines just gets dropped and forgotten about roughly 2-thirds of the way in.

Overall I'd recommend this game. I really enjoyed my playthrough.

Really bad.

• Runs poorly.
  
• Multiplayer-only but is a dead game so have fun playing alone.
  
• No tutorials. First run consist of trying to read tiny text and comprehend items while in danger/taking damage.
  
• Repetitive environments.
  
• The atmosphere is nice though. Very dark and grimy.

Qube 2 is so much worse than the first. All the interesting mystery is gone. The atmosphere is bad. The first game was like Portal and you kept playing to find out what was going on. This one gives no intensives to keep playing. It's like they gave up and said: it's a puzzle game, that's the theme. Speaking of: some puzzles as jank AF. Don't get me wrong, the first game had a few physics-timing based puzzles as well but it's worse here.

The absolute works part: the part that makes it seem like the devs gave up is that the entire game is a string of hub rooms with 5 doors. 4 puzzle rooms and the exit door. It's the same setup like 7 times and then the game just ends. "Here: beat these 4 puzzles and do them in whatever order you like and move on to the next 4" WTF is that structure?

If you enjoyed the first game let me tell you right now: playing the second isn't necessary. It may even make you retroactively dislike the first game for how bad it is.

Ever play a game that was great but the ending was so unbelievably horrendously bad that it retroactively ruins the entire experience?

This game isn't very good.

• This is going to sound strange but this game hearts my eyes. Not a joke. It's all pastel colours with no shading. Everything is bright.
  
• The game is too short. It's less than an hour long, even if you read every single optional dialog. It's hard to say you get your money's worth, even if you buy the game on sale. To put things in perspective: if you watch the two trailer you've successfully seen every character and location in the game.
  
• One positive is the writing is good. It's not very snappy and relies on repetition. The humour often stems from an exaggerated reaction to someone saying something silly.
  
• Another positive thing is the character design. They all look nice. Their names are kind of bland however. Also it's weird to call a lobster “Larry” because that's a minor character from Spongebob. Maybe it's a reference?
  
• The game has an intentionally-poorly-made look where animations are simple, characters hold objects poorly and the font looks like it was designed after free-hand drawing of letters in an image editor. Not necessarily a bad thing. Just something to note.
  
• One thing that hampers the entire experience is the game camera is jittery. Maybe it has something to do with the game being super easy to render. There's no vsync to fix it either. The easiest way to see it is walking left and right. Basically every second the camera will skip forward. I know the game is far from being about the looks but it would be nice if it didn't have this weird camera stutter.
  
• The biggest downside to this game is the gameplay is literally the worst part of other games. It's all just one muti-step fetch quest. You know, the most hated and tedious part of other games that's only around to pad them out. You pick up a phone, go to an island and exchange items between characters on the islands and you're done. The game is over. That's it. That's all.
  
• The oddest thing is this game is rated “Overwhelmingly Positive”. It really isn't good. I only tried the game out because of this rating so it was extra disappointing to find that it was sub-par. How disappointing.