Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest

"'E-Z', but fun to play!"

Cubivore is a very… interesting game. I’m English, but I had to get this game, after all it was a Miyamoto game!

GRAPHICS
Cubivore was originally a Nintendo 64 game called Animal Leader, to be released in conjunction with Animal Forest (Which is now Animal Crossing on GameCube), therefore the graphics are very simplistic. That isn’t to say that they aren’t good. You see, I judge a game on how well the graphics suit a game, not how realistic the graphics are. The animals or monsters (whatever you want to call them) are all cube shaped with small flaps or ‘limbs’ attached to them in different ways, depending on how you have mutated.

Overall, graphics aren’t that good in comparison to other games on GameCube, however they do work well in the settings.

SOUND
The sound is pretty decent, not to great though. It’s rather atmospheric most of the time, however it gets slightly irritating in boss battles. There aren’t many different tunes in the game either, but there is always the option to simply turn off the sound and listen to a CD…

STORY
Basically, there used to much colour and beauty in the… wait… where are they anyway? Well, never mind, I‘ll call it a forest. I’ll try again. There used to be much beauty in the forest until the evil monster came and took over and made it grey and dull. But you, the cube, wants to overthrow them by eating and mating to become stronger. Yes, mating. I’ll get back to that in the gameplay section.

GAMEPLAY
The game revolves around mutating and mating to get stronger to fight bosses. In each level you have to reach the exit, which is impassable until you fight and defeat the boss, which is usually several times more powerful than a usual monster.

Most of the time you’ll be fighting to get meat so that you can mutate into a stronger monster. Mutating basically means that the way your limbs are positioned, which affects your speed, hit points, attack power and defence, how far it can jump, how far it can pounce from and how fast it can move backwards. The way you mutate is kind of weird: You kill an enemy then eat one of it’s limbs to gain it’s colour.

You start as a Pig type cube monster. Your name at the beginning is ‘Piggy <Your Name>’, however you do eventually become other things, but I won’t spoil it for you.

Mating in the game let’s you gain more limbs, for every time you mate you die (No, really) and your child is born with an extra limb., so you get to control him. The more times you mutate, the more females you attract and therefore the more choice you get for which monster you can ’E-Z Mutate’ into at any time.

‘E-Z Mutation’ basically means that you can change into that shape at any time in-game, so that if you no longer want to be that shape any more, just press on the D-Pad!

Which brings me to controls. Controls are very simple and easy to learn and it is always comfortable to play the game, with the controls being very responsive.

You often have to look for ‘wildebugs’ to restore land to a part of stage allowing you to pass, this can be quite annoying having to look for them in order to continue. Although, this is a small part of the game…

Overall, very fun, very simple gameplay.

REPLAY
You will probably want to play again, as it is a very fun game, and there are things to unlock in the game, but the game doesn’t last very long.

RENT OR BUY?
This is a reasonably hard to find game, so if you see it, buy!

Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 6/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Replay: 8/10
Overall: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/11/04