At first sight Puzzle Dimension instantly reminded me of an old ball-rolling PlayStation game (1998) called Kula World (AKA Roll Away in the USA), so I wasn’t surprised to find that Doctor Entertainment founders Jesper Rudberg and Anders Pistol were involved in Kula World, as well as several blockbuster first person games such as the Battlefield series, The Darkness, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.
Rolling a ball forward, backwards, left or right along a path made up from different blocks to collect flowers sounds like a walk in the park, and initially at least, it is. Puzzle Dimension is easy to play yet within a few levels bends the mind to the point of breaking. Starting off with simple levels the craftiness knob is soon tweaked up to ‘11’ and I found myself frequently sitting staring at the screen, completely stumped, convinced the game was broken and something was missing. Of course, the game wasn’t broken and the only thing that was missing was the solution. It’s usually at this point that I decided to have “one more go” during which I had a Eureka moment and everything fell into place...
Puzzle Dimension is that sort of game, and you’ll probably already know whether you’ll love it or hate it.
As I’ve already said, Puzzle Dimension is instantly accessible, easy to learn and easy to play, and there’s a nice tutorial to get you going. The game’s rules of gravity and movement are easy to grasp, yet the way that the blocks can twist and turn your head upside down and inside-out despite the fact that the ball always rolls along the “bottom” of a level is quite amazing. The objective is always the same; roll the ball over all the sunflowers and exit through the portal. At the start of a level the blocks are all pixelated and rolling over them or within one block of them changes them into beautiful HD ones with a shower of pixels. The music also reacts to your progress by shifting from 8-bit retro-style tunes that sound like they came from the Commodore 64 era to crystal clear atmospheric music. You must unpixelate all the blocks on a level to score the maximum. Blocks aren’t always connected so your ball has the ability to jump with a press of ‘X’, some gaps are larger and simply getting to certain blocks seems impossible, yet there is always a way...
The blocks or tiles that make up the levels come in several different types; normal ones that you can roll over, stop and change direction on, collapsing blocks (crumble as you land on them but only fall away when you move off them), Ice (you can’t stop or change direction on these), Fire (you can only pass over them once as they burst into flames), Sand (you can’t roll on these), Hidden (only visible at certain distances), Launcher (hurls your ball over two blocks), Switch (this will turn on/off spiked blocks and also activate some normal ones that vanish/reappear) and Teleport (transports you to a different point on a level). There are also three additional themes to unlock which radically change the look of the game-the undersea one in particular nearly did my head in as I looked “down” at the surface of the water, from below!
Puzzle Dimension is a perfect example of an action puzzle game, but it does have a few flaws. The fact that some of tiles can only be used once means you can make one wrong move in the middle of the level rendering it impossible to finish, so you have to restart the level or fall off and “die” on purpose. I’m not a huge fan of puzzles that do this and I think you should always be able to rescue yourself if you make a mistake. A Prince of Persia-style rewind feature or even a “replay last move” option would have made this game perfect for impulsive, clumsy idiots like me. And finally, although you have a ‘camera’ mode available with a press of ‘triangle’ that is supposed to give you an unburdened look at a level, its movement could be a lot freer.
My time with Puzzle Dimension has come through three distinct phases; an initial period of apathetic indifference because “it’s just a puzzle game”, followed by a time where I was completely addicted to it culminating in periods when I hated it because one particular level had me stumped (you can nearly always go and try another though). Now I return to it occasionally as an oasis of ingenuity and cleverness in a gaming schedule full of flashy, yet barely indistinguishable dross. I will complete every level, I will.
There are 10 themed blocks each containing 10 puzzles, and this will supply many hours (days, weeks even) of gameplay for most of us. At £7.99 (from the PlayStation Store) Puzzle Dimension is an absolute steal. You will however have to have your brain in gear to make any progress, so if Call of Duty is the most cerebral thing you’ve played lately then be warned.
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