Lively Cubes

Stick a big friendly face on anything and it suddenly becomes far more appealing. Our tendency to anthropomorphise inanimate objects even sees us visualising facial features where there are none.

We start seeing cars with giant googly eyes and toothy grins where, in actual fact, they possess fairly ordinary headlamps and radiator grilles.

It’s pretty simple, then, to give an abstract match-three puzzle game a bit of personality by slapping a silly face on each of the blocks. That’s exactly what Shamrock Games has done with Lively Cubes, and it works a treat.

To call that the reason for its undeniable appeal, though, would be to do the game a disservice. Underneath the bright, bouncy presentation Lively Cubes is built on good solid game design.

While the object of each level is to match up multiple blocks of each colour, the game approaches this worn concept from an interesting angle. You can shift any of the blocks around the level as many spaces as you like, and only two of each colour have to touch in order to be cleared.

This opens up all new problems, though. If you have three of one colour, for example, you need to avoid touching only two of them, lest you get left with an odd block.

There are numerous neat mechanisms to keep things interesting, too. There are cranes that need activating, lasers that need deactivating (after you’ve used them to blast through a barrier, of course), and an assortment of power-ups to make use of.

These range from the brilliant (give a block a helmet capable of withstanding a laser) to the unsatisfying (teleporter).

Similarly mixed are the random elements, with the happy face that appears from time to time leading to an opportunistic dash to score some bonus points. Conversely the evil block-chewing face just proves annoying on certain levels, barely giving you a chance to get across the screen to eradicate it.

While the balance may be off with each of these elements, they all serve to spice up a formula that's rather too simplistic to hold your attention on its own. They also disguise some level design that only occasionally strays above decent.

But Lively Cubes is so fun to play that we can forgive many of these shortcomings. Appropriately, it’s one of those mobile games that, for a while at least, puts a smile on your face.