Looking for a no-frills puzzle game that will have you scratching your head? Then RUSH fits the bill perfectly. The game’s premise is simple; you have colored cubes that you need to deliver to their specific destinations. The 3D levels that you encounter provide unique obstacles as you have to incorporate the cube movements along with other tools to direct these cubes. While there were puzzles that provided a challenge, for the most part I was able to skate through the levels with skill, luck or pure guessing.
The gameplay is very easy to understand and figure out. Cubes turn right when they hit an obstacle and you can direct them with the various tools provided to you. These tools include directional arrows, conveyor belts, warps, stop signs, splits etc. The tutorial and easy levels are a breeze and only when you hit the medium levels do you start having to really rack your brain. Besides the 3D levels that provide various obstacles, the speed and rate at which the cubes generate from their starting points begin to vary. So a solution that may have seemed simple in the beginning, now requires tweaking as you will encounter collisions. But it was definitely a nice feeling to solve a puzzle with lots of cubes entering, criss-crossing, and exiting in perfect sync without colliding in to each other. If you do manage to get through the tutorial, easy, medium, and hard levels, there are extra bonus levels that the devs have provided for you to tackle.
If you are stumped, there are two levels of hints provided. One tells you if the tiles you have set on the level are in the right place or if the right tool is in the right place. The second hint actually shows you the areas that you should be placing your tiles. Only for the really complex 3D levels did I have to tap in to this feature. The fact that they give you a set number of tiles is a spoiler in itself because now you know that to solve the puzzle you will need to use all of the tiles provided to you. I’m not sure if every level has multiple solutions but throwing in extra tiles would have made the gameplay a little more challenging. A score/grading system based on the minimum number of tiles used to solve the puzzle would have given the game a unique spin.
Graphics wise the game is very simplistic. Starting from the menu system to the individual levels, I really didn’t get a “wow” or “this is beautiful” impressions. I think different backgrounds and cube designs would have made this game much more visibly appealing and polished (see game Puzzle Dimension). The 3D levels can be viewed from different angles by holding the right-mouse button to figure out the solution. A zoom in/out feature would have been nice for certain levels that did not fit the screen. I also had to manually tone down the brightness of my screen as there was no such feature within the game.
The music started to become very repetitive after the first few levels and I had to turn it off eventually. The remaining game sounds fit the game well with a robotic voice telling you how well you had done after solving a puzzle. There isn’t much to say about the control system as all of it is done with the mouse. You select and drag/drop tiles using the left-mouse button and the delete key resets all tiles placed.
I believe a level creator would make this game more popular and it would probably do better in the handheld/smartphone area for cheaper price point with a DLC/addon level creator. Some kind of ranking/scoring system based on time spent solving the puzzle, usage of tiles etc. would probably give the game a little boost in the replay area. But overall, the game is worth the $4.99 price point on Steam. If you enjoy a no-frills puzzle game and want to exercise your brain, RUSH is worth the pickup. Check out the video below to get a peek in to the game.
