Lumines

"If you don't have this game for your PSP I'm going to come over and smack you!"

Lumines (pronounced “loo-means”) is one of the best puzzle games to hit the market in quite some time. It is an addictive puzzle/rhythm game coming from one of the creators of the underappreciated Dreamcast/PS2 game, Rez, which was a cracked out rail shooter that featured background music that changed as to how you played the game. Surprisingly, Lumines didn't sell that well in Japan, but the word of mouth caused a growing demand from the American audience that convinced Ubi Soft to pick up the game and release it in time for the PSP launch. It is a good thing they did because Lumines is a perfect fit for the PSP, and is my favorite game out of the launch library.

One of the main things that stick out about this title is the extraordinary music, and much like in Rez it changes beats and tones as you place different colored 2x2 blocks down a wider than usual dropbox. Unlike Tetris however, this isn't simply completing lines in quick fashion, this is a puzzler that tries your patience and adds several layers of strategy by forming 2x2 blocks of the same color. Now once an all colored square is made it doesn't necessarily disappear automatically, instead you have to wait for a scrolling bar (the game labels this the “timeline”) to come across the screen and wipe out the combo for you. These extra several seconds gives you a prime opportunity to keep adding to the squares in hopes of forming a bigger block combo by the moment the timeline zooms by.

Other little crosses and certain sized shapes like boxes and whatnot can be formed, but I found them rather hard to pull off, and when I did run across one, it was almost always by luck. The included “puzzle” mode in the game helps you practice forming these shapes in a given time limit, so that might help others out more. Occasionally there are special blocks that fall down you have to watch out for too that can cause a chain reaction of multiple blocks vanishing across the dropbox when linked up with the right 2x2 square.

I cannot stress how important the music is in Lumines, the fact that how you play the game changes the tone of the mesmerizing tunes help immerse you into the experience like no other puzzle game before it. When the music changes as you progress through the puzzles, the themes of the environment and colored squares change as well. While these visuals certainly don't push the PSP hardware to its limits, keep in mind it is just a puzzle game, and there are plenty of neat animations for combo strings and faces your character icon makes while you play the game that add just a little bit of pizzazz to the game. To get the most out of the audio experience, please make sure you have the earphones plugged in. There is a great difference in the quality of audio from the teeny PSP speaker and the set of included earphones with the PSP.

There are several different skins in the game to unlock that give a different makeover for the surroundings you play in and the catchy audio tracks that blast away in the background. They can be unlocked in the single player Challenge mode, where you simply keep knocking out combos of squares until you bust. Once a certain goal is met, you move onto the next level and the skin changes instantaneously without a loading time. Another way to unlock skins is by beating the computer in versus mode. The multiplayer has a unique feel to it as the wide dropbox starts off evenly split in two. As you continue to clear out bigger strings of combos than your opponent, the wider your side of the dropbox will get to your advantage. This makes it even more challenging for your opponent as they have to deal with the extra lack of space, but I also found it to be a great moment for myself when I came back from what I thought were impossible odds against the computer and my friends.

Other modes featured in Lumines is the self explanatory Time Attack that has you choose a time limit for yourself to see how high of a score you can achieve. Then there is Single Skin mode where just one skin is picked so you can see how well you fare in just one environment. Finally, you can play wirelessly against your friend in Versus mode, via WiFi Ad-Hoc. That's the wireless support where your rival has to be within a certain radius of you much like how the DS multiplayer works. From the sessions I tried out, it worked fine with no noticeable interference with the wireless support that caused any skips during gameplay. My only gripe with the multiplayer is that I would have liked to seen Infrastructure WiFi support for online network play to find an opponent online anytime and to see how well my high-scores compared to the nation's best.

I can go on and on about what makes puzzle games work and why the genre has been so dormant for years until now. They are one of the defining genres on the portable gaming format, and they only need three things to make them stand out and be great – highly innovative gameplay that can addict you for hours on end, a chart that saves your high scores for bragging rights, and a multiplayer option that can keep you playing forever with your friends. Lumines has all three of these in spades, and is hands down the best thing to happen to the puzzle genre since Tetris. It's a game nearly everyone can get into no matter what age group or type of gamer you are. For all of you PSP owners, Lumines is the true killer app for this platform, and you owe it to yourself to include it in your PSP library.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/04/05