Reviews - AkiraTea

First off I would like to congratulate the modders on their first campaign. The mix of the film “CUBE, ” the TV show ”LOST,” and the games portal and Half-Life 2 way interesting to say the lease. Where this mod excels at is the flash sequences of the past or madness that drive the story.

This is one of the best looking and sounding mods I’ve seen in a while. With that said, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have problems.

Cube’s art, story, and concept is very good but the problem is that you have to get through puzzles which by the 3rd chapter become death taps or not designed in a way that the player can understand what the goal is. The difficulty level jumps to plain frustration. The level/game design doesn’t allow for exploration and the player’s only reward for trying is death. Death only slows that player down and demoralizes them. There is a reason death wasn’t a common consequence in Portal. Some puzzles are not even puzzles there just guessing the right path or order of things.

The mod constantly makes references to Portal (Aperture Labs) and how the company in Cube has made improves on their technology. But the improvements are just changes to game elements that worked very well in Portal to different game elements that don’t work. These new elements failing to work as intended are why many puzzles/areas are much more difficult they should be. Example of this is the jump panels. In some cases the puzzles are easy to understand but you continually fight the game elements to do what their intended to do. Example: door fuse puzzles in the last quarter of the mod.

With more attention to level design, puzzle design, unnecessary game element changes, and overabundance of death as a consequence this could have been the best mod I’ve played in years. From the very high level frustration with this mod I doubt that may people will want to finish it.

Hope to see what comes from these Modders in the future.

Please consider releasing a tutoral on the flashbacks.