Game on: RUSH

Today, we're looking at RUSH, another Two Tribes game, available on Steam.

In a Nutshell

Rush is a puzzle game in which you guide colored blocks to colored goals using signs, conveyor belts and walls while avoiding collisions.

Story

There's no story to this game. Just 3 tiers of levels you can tackle in pretty much any order.

Gameplay

In each RUSH level, you are given a field with starting differently colored block spawning points and matching goal areas. Using a variety of tiles, ranging from direction-changing arrows, conveyor belts, splits, stop signs, the occasional portal and the geometry of the levels, you have to guide the blocks to their goals. This game's puzzles are all about logic, planning and some trial and error to see how certain configurations work. The main threats to your success are collisions between blocks and, as levels get trickier, it becomes more complicated to mesh the various streams of blocks. To help you, however, a robust hint system is included that can either tell you if the tiles you placed are right or wrong or tell where tiles have to go and whether those you placed are right. It also runs a tally of the number of hints you used for a level. Of course, it never is as exciting to solve a level if you needed to use hints the whole way through. The game features 66 main levels (6 tutorials, 20 easy levels, 20 medium levels and 20 hard levels) as well as 15 extra levels if you join the RUSH group on Steam and 5 extremely challenging levels associated to the Portal 2 ARG. The difficulty curves nicely and some levels are very challenging, which makes them all the better when you successfully solve them. Of course, abusing the hints will rob you of such a feeling of accomplishment.

Presentation

RUSH looks very nice, it goes for a very colorful and shiny style where everything is made from cubes and tiles and it manages to look very good. There is, however, no real variety to i, once you've seen the first level, you've seen more or less all of them. Though I must say, the individual levels all look distinctive enough and fit very well in the aesthetic, but the lack of themes or variations make this game look a bit boring after a while. The music is catchy enough, but it, too, lacks a bit of variety at times.

Verdict

If you're looking for a fun puzzle game where logic, planning and trial and error meet a cubical, angular, colorful and shiny world, you will without a doubt enjoy RUSH quite a lot. For what it is, RUSH is a Nice and challenging title. It's not extraordinary, but it's competent and fun, especially for a low price point of $4.99.