Cubivore First Impressions

February 18, 2006

This game is not quite so... open-ended as I'd imagined.  I was thinking more like an expanded EVO.  In that SNES game you could "purchase" different versions of specific body parts to customize your creature.  I figured that in a game where everything is made of simple shapes, it would be easier to allow for weird combinations.  Not so much.  It's more a case of that as you go through the game, you will be a creature with a different number of limbs.  And for each of those groups, depending on what colors of meat you eat, you will mutate into a different type of creature with that number of limbs.  By "limbs" they really mean thin square shapes which will be arranged in various ways.  A two limbed creature might have the two connected to make a sort of frog-leg shape, or they might branch out like two legs, or come off of two different sides of the cube head altogether.  There's a lot of variety for sure, it's just their variety.

I also didn't realize the game was linearly arranged into stages.  In each stage you can eat creatures, find other items which will help you do things like grow horns, but you'll stay the same number of limbs.  At the end of a stage you'll end up in a tougher boss fight, and when you win you get a special piece of meat.  This is where things get weird...er.  At the beginning of the next stage, you'll get the chance to go into an entrance shaped like a heart.  Depending on how many "lovebits" you've collected in previous stages, a varying number of female-looking cube things will want to mate with you.  It shows you and them running off screen, and will then tell you that a subset of those had offspring, with one more limb than before.  You pick one of these, and they become your new character.  Memory seems to transfer over, but it's still kinda creepy to see your dead head on the ground while your new little guy inflates before your eyes.  Sometimes you'll even hit a bigger turning point, and go all the way back to being a one-limbed creature of a different sort, to mutate on in a different way.

Graphics... well, love them or hate them.  I'm more on the "love" side, though it's not perfect.  The visual style of almost everything being made of cubes (or at least rectangular prisms) is cool.  Other than the rectangles you've pretty much got bumps on the rectangles (scars, horns, other designs), a few plants, and water.  And even the water has square ripples.  However, part of the reason I dig games with a low polygon look is for the other benefits it provides, and Cubivore really should do better in some of these.  Frame rate is perfect... but while the draw distance is fine for the scenery, you can't always see the animals that you will when you get closer.  Also, considering how basic everything is and how few textures there are, some of them should really be higher resolution and thus provide a crisper look when a fourth of your screen is using it.

The music is nothing outstanding, but fun.  The sounds are very different from the graphics, and do very much sound like real animals, though the total number of sounds does not seem high.

The game has a weird sense of humor.  The bosses have names like Cubscout Beast, CEO Beast, Parental Advisory Beast.  In discovering itself as a being through journalish bits of text between stages, your creature at one point mentions a growing desire to seek out females and... belly dance with them?  Your main goal is to evolve into a creature powerful enough to take on the current King of all Cubivores.  To do that, though, you need good parents.  And the female that's supposed to give birth to the highest level?  The Consu-Mate.