Cubes

It might be pure coincidence, but when more pirate themed games appear in a single month than we'd normally expect over a year, we're inclined to point our collective finger towards Mr Depp's antics aboard the Black Pearl.

Maybe the release of Transformers will put an end to it, but until we start seeing an increase in games featuring big stompy robots, we're going to continue to approach anything involving Jolly Rogers or wooden legs with a cautious air of cynicism.

Take Cubes, for example, a Tetris-inspired falling block game containing – you guessed it – pirates. But there's a lesson here in not being too quick to judge, because it turns out Cubes is actually very, very good. In fact, the piratey twist serves to separate this game from the many other Tetris clones out there.

Us and our big mouth, eh?

Your task is to steal treasures from Willy, a rival rascal o' the high seas. Willy, it seems, has taken to throwing his plundered goods from the edge of a wooden dock (presumably as a less labour-intensive alternative to burying it randomly around the Caribbean).

This is where you come in. As Willy dumps his purloined wealth into the bay, it passes into your control. Typical of the genre, you must then move and rotate the falling cubes, matching them up with boxes of the same colour. Connect three or more matching boxes and they explode, disgorging their expensive cargo directly into your possession.

Occasionally, Willy will drop something other than treasure. Gunpowder-filled barrels create a blast that opens every cube, regardless of colour, within a certain radius. Spinning blades also turn up and cut through the bonds that hold some cubes together, usually making your task easier.

Because this all takes place underwater, the cubes have a surprising amount of mobility. If you plough the descending boxes down into the stack on the sea bed, they'll scatter all over the place, bouncing off each other and from the invisible walls down each side of the playfield.

This enables two distinctly different styles of play, as you can either try to place each new cube strategically, or you can opt to bombard them into the existing pile and hope for the best. This second option is by far the more fun and, surprisingly, often turns out to be the more successful, too.

Another winner is Cubes' pirate theme, which creates an atmosphere rare in a puzzle game. From Willy himself – shuffling along with his wheelbarrow full of plunder – to the anonymous hook-handed pirate who acts as your mentor and mutters strangely to himself in-between each level, everything is presented with brilliant style and humour. The music is excellent, too, with a persistent and jaunty theme accompanying each level.

One area which lets Cubes down slightly is the graphics, which isn't to say they're bad. The problem is that they're perhaps a little too good, stretching the capabilities of the handset to its limits with realistic water effects and the physics of the multicoloured boxes. As a result, the performance occasionally drops, although this is never enough to make the game unplayable.

More serious is the problem which comes about after you fail to beat a level multiple times. Each time you restart a stage you've previously lost, Willy drops the boxes twice as fast as before. Eventually this becomes so severe that you instantly lose the level as two stacks of boxes spawn inside each other at the top of the screen. Sadly, the only way to overcome this 'bug' is to exit the game and reload.

Yet, ironically, what might have been a game-breaking bug actually helps extend Cubes' life as you'll more likely be inclined to restart the game rather than give up because of it.

It all comes down to gameplay, then, which thankfully features here by the shipload. Cubes is an excellent and stylish game that will easily eat up hours – a hugely satisfying puzzle experience, even if you may never quite manage to complete it.