Lunagames' Cube Touch: Match is a good example of gaming on a mobile device. You take a favourite concept – in this case, it's yet another Bejewelled clone – code it up and get it in the App Store for devices as soon as possible.
Unlike the recently reviewed Jewel Quest 3, Cube Touch: Match boils down the nature of the game to nothing more than the abstract; swap a pair of blocks to make a line of three colours, watch them disappear and carry on. If you take too long to do this, then the timer, a tiny pixel bar at the top of the screen, runs out and it's game over. Shorn of a b-movie plot grafted on top of a puzzle game, it's a credit to the intial designers of Bejewelled that they still have an addictive little game, and a credit also to Lunagames that they don't mess around with it and that they keep this as playable as possible.
Without extra graphics, the presentation of Cube Touch: Match is minimal in the extreme. You get a menu screen (with a rather loud swatch of purple colour behind it) which lets you toggle the sound and vibration options, and start the game. That's it. The same minimalism is also present in the game itself – the S60 5th Edition touchscreen is filled with the game grid, all brightly coloured with just a hint of 3d-ness to it, and that previously mentioned tiny “time left” line at the top of the screen.
The only real complaint I have is that to swap over a pair of blocks you need to touch them both. I'm expecting to do a swipe when I opened the game, so that took a bit of getting used to. This might be something to look at in any updates to the game.
Because of the large playing area, and the almost afterthought-like nature of your score, there is more than a hint of Zen when you play. It's not about the score, or the time, or being the best, it's about losing yourself in something that you play – there is more fun here than challenge. Whether that's something you need to have in a game you play day in and day out I'm not so sure about. But it is perfect when you need to “burn time” stuck on a long journey in economy class on an eleven hour flight from London to Los Angeles – for example.
There is one area you can challenge yourself to, and that's the online high score table (there isn't a local version, strangely enough). Being online, you can be sure that the scores are not 'faked' to make getting on the table easy. Any ranking you make is going to be because you deserve it.
Cube Touch: Match is more a novelty than a game, thanks to it's laissez-faire attitude to things like scores and skill levels – but given its price (free), and given my current mood, I can appreciate this title more as a timewaster and a novelty, rather than the latest finger twitching adrenaline challenge.
-- Ewan Spence, March 2010.