PIX3D
|
3DS
| PIX3D

PIX3D is a lazy angel. It gets nothing wrong, but then it also does hardly anything in the first place.

It's difficult to find fault with any of the systems of play it tries to implement, but it attempts far too little over the course of the couple of hours it'll take you to finish it.

It's not an expensive download, and nor is it badly produced. It's central premise wouldn't be too boring if it constituted a portion of a much larger game. There's just shockingly little to find here.

Lack-pixel

The main idea of PIX3D is that you need to create whole pixel-art images, displayed in the bottom-right of the top screen, from a collection of pixels that you can freely rotate.

That's it.

You use either the stylus on the touchscreen or the Circle Pad to spin the pixels, and when you line them up just right the picture is complete and you move onto the next. Each picture is part of a themed collection, such as Warfare, Food, Japan, and a number of other loosely connected images.

In the main mode you won't run out of time, but you're graded out of three stars on how quickly you complete them. At the end of each set there's a Boss Image, which is lots of smaller sections of the same picture - but, again, you're just rotating the individual components one by one until you succeed.

Complete enough of these and you'll unlock the Extreme mode, where you're given a very strict time limit and must complete the entire set for victory. You can control the speed at which the collection of pixels rotates, but it's never very fast, so turning it the wrong way for even a few seconds usually results in you failing the entire set.

No bigger picture to see

You can also create your own pixel images in a fully featured editor. Want to make a custom set of Mario-themed pixel-art to play with? Go for it - just don't expect to be able to share it on the world stage, as online functionality is non-existent. This is the same for leaderboards - there's no way to compare your rankings against others.

It's well-presented: tidy menus get you into the game promptly, everything runs quickly, and the 3D effect is genuinely useful here, though not crucial. The soundtrack is limited but inoffensive, while effects are high quality but sparse.

However, we keep coming back to the fact that there's nothing more to do. The gameplay is extremely basic, and apart from some exceptionally difficult Extreme levels you'll have seen everything it has to offer in no time at all.

There's just not that much game to this game. It's super-shallow fun that you'll rarely want to revisit once you've played a few rounds, as it all becomes very tedious. It's a quality product to be sure, but a very small one, offering little diversity.

PIX3D

Well made but ultra-repetitive, PIX3D is clearly the work of a very talented team, but runs out of ideas within five minutes of play
Score
Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.