Trioncube is a fairly nifty puzzler on the DS. If you can imagine Tetris, where you have various shapes falling that you have to slot together, but instead of lines across the screen you have to make 3x3 squares, you're pretty much there. The only thing is that the squares don't disappear immediately, they hang around for a while giving you the chance to make another 3x3 block, and again and again. Actually, as all the pieces that you get are made out of blocks of 3, and there are only a few ways to arrange these, it's very easy to stack together combos that fill the entire screen if you don't have any interference. The simplicity makes it great for kids or absolute game novices, but for me it was a little too simple.
I think anyone might get bored playing the game continuously in the same way as Tetris, so Trioncube tries to make things more interesting by having a story mode. The story tells a tale of a little chap sent off into space by his King to rescue a Princess. The hero's spaceship is powered by you getting combos of squares, and each level tweaks the rules of the game slightly by doing various things such as getting a time limit to get to a given score, or overtake an AI player's spaceship (essentially overtake their score), or just plain interfere with play by dropping rocks onto the grid.
It'll take an hour and a half to blast through the story mode, or alternatively you can play against a friend whereby you race to a chosen score, but I think most people will be lucky to last 20 minutes with the music on. It's charming, but a little too repetitive to last, and mostly doesn't change, a bit like the rest of the game. There's not a lot else to talk about sound wise, aside from the ability to choose (and earn new as you play) sound effects when you get a combo going, and the presentation is cute, but with little graphical flair.
Personally I think Trioncube is a little too simple for its own good, unless you have friends to play against, and even then I think it's probably best between less experienced gamers or kids. Perhaps not one for the 'Gamecell crowd', but worth a thought if you can find it cheap this Christmas to accompany the DS as a present for a non-gaming loved one.
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