G.G Series: Vector

Genre: Falling Block Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Vector is a Falling-Block Puzzle game released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2015, as well as being made available on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. In this game, players must not only match colored blocks as they fall, but they must also line up the arrows on those blocks to point to the next one in the chain.

The presentation here is not especially compelling. While the game does have a lot of bright color in its 2D visuals (not vector graphics, as one might expect from a game called Vector), there’s stylistically not much else going on here to make those visuals memorable. What’s more, the game is backed by extremely repetitive energetic background music that will get annoying within seconds of listening to it.

Unfortunately, the gameplay does little to redeem this game. At the very least I can say that it works. Yes, having to match colors and line up arrows is a unique approach to the Falling-Block Puzzle genre. Unfortunately, the way this game goes about this has absolutely no difficulty. Just create a stack of each color and have them all facing up, and you can sleep your way through the game.

It looks like the game’s creators realized this and tried to shove some challenge by having the game’s speed get fast absurdly quickly, and the game’s hardest difficulty will sometimes rotate pieces independent of your input, but that doesn’t make the game harder, it just makes it difficult to control and play.

Alternately, I can think of no less than three solutions to this game’s challenge problem: Have designated “start” and “end” pieces, give players blocks with multiple pieces at once (a la Dr. Mario), or simply remove the ability to spin pieces altogether – doing the latter would have been exceedingly simple, and would have forced players to think their way through creating paths using the blocks as they receive them. Unfortunately, rather than go for any of these solutions to the lack of difficulty, the game opted instead with the terrible solutions that this game tries to use.

With a combination of terrible presentation, overly-easy gameplay, and difficulty spikes that only make the game harder by making it less playable, Vector takes a potentially good Puzzle Game idea and drags it down to make it an entry in the genre that is alternately pointless and frustrating. Skip it.

tl;dr – Vector is a Falling Block Puzzle game where players must not only match the color of falling blocks, but must line up arrows on those blocks. It’s a decent enough idea, but it’s ruined by a terrible presentation, gameplay that’s so easy you can sleepwalk through it, and difficulty spikes that don’t add a challenge so much as they just make the game less playable. The result is a tedious frustrating mess of a Puzzle game not worth playing.

Grade: D+

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