The Lumines titles are a series of puzzle videogames that put a lot of stress on the interaction of gameplay, music and visuals. Born of the minds at Q Entertainment, Lumines was first released for the PSP on December of 2004. Since then the game has enjoyed ports to many other systems, including the PS2, Xbox 360, PC and last year to the PS3 on the Playstation Network. For those who haven’t been exposed to the game by now, the premise is rather simple: you play on a grid and blocks fall continuously from the top; your goal is to get the highest score by making same colour rectangles before you run out of spaces to put these blocks in.
Sensory Overload
The best tracks can be found on OSTs.
Truly the most spectacular part of Lumines is the way the soundtrack, sound effects and trippy visuals interact with your actions to create a unique experience. This aspect of the game is so central It’s almost impossible to talk about Lumines’ soundtrack or visuals without explaining what is it they do and what you can do to them. The game revolves around skins, a combination of background visuals (usually animated), new textures for the falling blocks, a music score, and sound effects. These skins go from abstract themes to videogame inspired ones like the famous Little Big Planet skin.
The sound effects respond to every action you take in the game: move the square left or right, rotate it, drop it, make a square and clear it… you name it. Everything that you are doing is adding more layers of depth to the music in such a way that creates a constant feedback for what is happening in the game. You go through each skin without pause, and both the music and the visuals transform from one skin to the other changing the virtual scenery and making you adapt to new visual queues and different beat. The music score contains various genres and is usually very good at keeping with the pace of the game. The tracks, however, can be a bit repetitive and, while there are great songs across all the Lumines games, there are quite a lot of songs that you would not choose to listen outside of the game.
Gameplay
Crazy beats and puzzle gameplay.
As I mentioned before, the purpose of the game on the main gameplay mode is simply to survive and amass points. You do that by controlling and dropping the blocks that continuously fall from the top of the play-field. These larger blocks are composed of four cells and each cell can be of one of two colours. Make any sort of square with same colour cells and the time-line will then dissolve the square and get some points added to your score. The cells you have used to make a square can also be used to make other adjacent squares and it is in this way that combos can be done. The falling blocks respond to a sort of gravity that changes between skins. This means two things. The first is that the speed at which the blocks fall as well as the time it takes them to start falling changes depending on the skin you are playing on. The second is that when part of one of these blocks hits an obstruction while falling, the unobstructed part of the block will continue to fall until it can rest on top of something.
The second most important element is the time line. This is a line that sweeps the play-field and dissolves any rectangle that you’ve previously made. The speed of the time-line has several effects on gameplay. Faster timelines can make big combos (where you delete many blocks in one sweep) harder, while a slow time-line can have your blocks and rectangles pile up and give you less room to continue dropping them. Furthermore, rectangles that are created while the time-line passes through them are only partially deleted, which in turn adds another element players need to keep an eye out for.
Apart from the main game mode where you try to get the best score and unlock new skins, there are a few other modes that appear in most versions of the game. These modes include Time Attack, Versus and Puzzle mode. Time Attack gives you a set amount of time to clear as many blocks as possible, competing for high scores. Versus mode splits the playing field in half and pits you against a friend on a battle that has you fighting for more and more screen space with the purpose of making the other player loose. Finally, Puzzle mode challenges you to create different shapes with the colour blocks.
Final Words
Lumines does many things right and succeeds at holding my attention despite all the frustrating moments that sometime come with puzzle games like this. The combination of catchy tunes and vibrant visuals make for a aesthetically pleasing game while the clear set of rules that encourage experimentation produces an addictive mix of which I haven’t tired of yet. Practise does make perfect in Lumines and the fact that you can see yourself getting better and better does much to keep the interest for the game alive. At the current price tag, it’s a great purchase for console owners everywhere.
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