Lumines has some minor flaws, but thanks to the great gameplay, visuals and sound effects, you barely even notice them.
From the looks of it, the gameplay of Lumines is pretty similar to Tetris’ at first. Two-coloured blocks made of four little rectangles, varying in the way the colours are situated, fall down the screen, making your task to hold off for as long as you can before any of them reach the top. Moving the blocks left and right, you have to form solid square shapes, which later get deleted off the screen by a thin line also known as the Timeline, moving along the screen horizontally all the time during the game. The more shapes it wipes off in one go, the bigger the score bonus. Even though it all may seem to be pretty easy, Lumines actually has a lot of depth to it.
There are a handful of multiplayer and singleplayer modes available in Lumines, though it’s easy to point out two as the “main ones” – Challenge Mode and Single Skin Mode. Both names are pretty self-explanatory - in Single Skin mode, you continuously play using the same skin all the time, boosting your high-score for that one skin. Challenge Mode, though, is where it’s all at – you start off having only one skin in your collection, and after playing for some time, unlock new ones, which are available in Single Skin mode later. Every five to ten minutes, a new skin is loaded, and you have to continue to rack up points until blocks reach the very top of the screen.
And you don’t want that to happen. Why? This is where the first minor fault of the game comes out – regardless of how many skins you have unlocked, you can not continue your progress from where you’ve lost. Instead, although all the unlocked skins remain in your skin collection in Single Skin mode, you have to restart Challenge mode all over again, and in order to get new skins, pass all the ones you’ve done already, first. It does add more challenge, forcing you not to do mistakes as much, but on the other hand, having to play those couple of skins over and over again can get pretty boring. Some kind of a skin shuffle function would’ve been pretty handy at this part, methinks.
Challenge and Single Skin modes aside, there’s also Puzzle Mode, in which you have to form different one-coloured figures in a given amount of time. Starting off with simple ones at first, the shapes get more and more complex later. If you get into it, you‘ll spend quite some time before you finish all the given tasks.
The multiplayer aspect of Lumines is relatively strong, too. You can either play versus a CPU bot, or take on a friend in a game using wireless Ad-Hoc capabilities. Whether you‘re playing versus a bot or another human, the gameplay is pretty much identical – the screen is divided in two sides, and you‘ve to create as many squares as you can, just as fast. The player who scores points faster gains more area for himself to navigate, thus leaving less for his opponent, so basically, it‘s like a battle for space. Obviously, multiplayer modes differ from singleplayer‘s in pace, hence are even more challenging.
Every single skin available in the game is made top notch. They all have different visuals, different music, and sound effects, and the latter ones are done amazingly well. No matter what you do in-game – move a block, form a square, score a bonus or whatever – the game reacts with various sounds, and the background music changes, as well. Graphics-wise, the game is very appealing, too - Lumines simply looks nice. Beyond that, though, blocks in some of the skins have too little contrast, hence it makes it harder, and you have to focus more attention not to place the blocks wrong.
All in all, Lumines has some minor flaws, but thanks to the great gameplay, visuals and sound effects, you barely even notice them. Though the game looks pretty simple at first, it’s just as simple to get into. Knowing just how cheap it is right now, Lumines is a great buy, and a must-have for every PSP owner.