QuBIT Review

Game: QuBIT

Developer: Secret Sauce

Publisher: Ideaworks Game Studio

Available on: iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad (Reviewed on iPad)

Going to the ‘Games’ section of the iTunes App Store will present you with a sea of lovely, lovely applications for your gaming amusement. Unfortunately there are a lot of those titles that really aren’t worth your time, some of them by a single programmer/designer and some of them by a group of people working hard to bring you what they think is the pinnacle of gaming.

On the other end of that scale are the games that everybody should be playing. They may have been buried in the sheer amount of other games out there, and that means that, despite their quality and the amount of care and attention that’s gone into their creation, they’re sometimes not noticed and not given the voice that they deserve.

Is this the case with QuBIT? Is it a game that everyone should be playing?

"Oooooooh, shiny!"

The gameplay in QuBIT revolves around the player constantly moving forward and collecting different coloured gems as they go. Crashing through these multi-coloured gems extinguishes one of the same coloured blocks that are orbiting the main QuBIT, and once all of these lights are extinguished the stage is over and everything starts all over again but with more of the orbiting blocks. This simple gameplay mechanic is the key to the addictive nature of QuBIT. It’s very simple to understand what’s going on and what’s expected of you and the more you play it the more you’ll find yourself uttering to yourself “Just one more level”, trying constantly to beat your own score until you have to go and do something else, or the battery dies on your device of choice.

The visuals of QuBIT are also something that shouldn’t be sniffed at! There are a lot of good looking games for the multitude of touch consoles now, and they’re only going to get better with more and more AAA studios adopting the format as a viable standard for their future games, and QuBIT is no exception. It has a consistently high frame rate throughout and nice looking 3D visuals that clearly show that this is a game that wasn’t cobbled together quickly. QuBIT has taken a lot of time, care and attention from only a few driven people to get it working, and looking as good as it does.

"Just...one more...speed boost!"

The biggest downside of QuBIT comes from the longevity of the game. Sure, it’s fun to wave the iPad or iPhone in the air doing mock steering motions and collecting points for it, trying to beat your friends’ score or your own, but how long until that stops being fun? There’s really nothing much else to do in QuBIT and while that main game mechanic is fun at first, it soon gets old. For this review I played QuBIT on the iPad, and while it looked great, holding the iPad out in front of me for extended periods of time got really old, really quickly. It’s a game that’s much more suited towards the smaller iDevices such as the iPhone or iPod touch. Play it on the iPhone 4, with the nice retina display, and you’ll be able to drink in all the beautiful graphics as well as the much easier gameplay too.

At the end of the day QuBIT is a nice little game, and it’s something relatively original in a sea of “same old, same old” but it really is a one trick pony and once you’re tired of that one trick you’re going to move onto something else. There’s nothing to keep people coming back for more besides the scoreboards, if that’s the kind of person you are, and that’s a shame because there’s clearly been a lot of care and attention put into QuBIT. A few more game modes would have made it something really special, but as it stands I can only say it’s worth if you like games the make full use of the accelerometer built into your device.

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