Rubik’s Race

You've probably already noticed the 'Rubik' moniker in the title of this review. You may be feeling a pang of guilt about that poor, neglected cube gathering dust under your bed, forever unsolved.

But don’t fret. Rubik’s Race doesn’t feature any cubes to prick your conscience, though it might hurt your brain a bit.

Based on a boardgame spin-off from 1982, Rubik’s Race is a puzzle of a different sort, where you have to slide tiles and match patterns against the clock. This version uses the same familiar colour scheme, but it’s been modernised with a pulsing eurobeat soundtrack that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hungarian discotheque.

There are three modes of play: Time Attack, Play & Pass, and Arcade. In Time Attack, you have to complete the randomly generated pattern at the top of the screen as quickly as possible. You do this by moving and arranging the tiles on the gameboard, presented in a grid of five by five.

The center nine tiles are the ones in play, whilst the outer ring of surplus tiles are meant to assist with adding and removing tiles from the centre.

It’s not just the fastest time that counts, but also the fewest moves used. These two variables make up your final score, which are sent to the Game Center leaderboards so that you can be the envy of all your chums.

Play & Pass is the same as above, except this time you can play against up to four people on the same iPad, each of you competing for the best score.

You might think that the person who goes last will have the greatest advantage, given that he'll have a benchmark score set by preceding players to work towards. But he won’t get to see the others' times until everyone has had a go.

The Arcade mode is perhaps the best of the three. The time-attack puzzles are split into sub-stages, where smaller, less complicated tile configurations have to be matched, and they can be tackled in any order. This is the game mode where 'perks' and 'pitfalls' are introduced, to shake things up a little bit.

A perk, when unlocked, can be activated at any time, and it allows you to do things like swap tiles around, erase them from the board, or change their colours. Pitfalls tend to be pretty annoying, like turning the board monochrome, or temporarily freezing everything in place whilst the clock ticks down.

First impressions of Rubik’s Race are solid. The soundtrack and the visuals are bright and perky, and the Rubik brand is comfortingly familiar.

But after a while the crack begin to show. There's nothing in particular wrong with Rubik's Race, but it lacks the compulsive quality of the best puzzlers. It's fun, but not addictive.

Another issue is that moving tiles around the board – by dragging them with your finger – isn’t responsive enough. Playing the game on a physical board would probably be much quicker, which defeats the point of this port entirely.

We felt a puzzling sort of affection towards Rubik’s Race, but it doesn’t have the scale or scope of most modern puzzlers. Conceptually, it’s still trapped in the 1980s.