While researching his illustrious genealogy, Bongo, a famous archaeologist ape, discovers that his ancestor, Bongohotep, possessed a great treasure. Bongo, prodigious primate that he is, resolves to recover his forefather's lost loot. Unfortunately, Bongo's nemesis, Bad Baboon, is also after the treasure and is trying to throw our primate protagonist off course by hurling giant cube-shaped idols and fruit in his way. Remembering his mother's advice, "If life throws you lemons, make lemonade," Bongo decides to turn these cubes into cold, hard cash by grouping them with two or more cubes of the same type. Sound familiar? It is. Congo Cube combines elements of Elimimatch, Tetris, and Baku Baku into a single, graphically impressive puzzler.
As in Elimimatch, you must swap items around the screen to group them either in 1x3 or 2x2 configurations. Unlike Elimimatch, Congo Cube constantly throws you new pieces to work with. You have to keep pace with the game to avoid being buried. Each level has a money quota that you must meet or beat to continue. You can make cash quickly using the game's "chaining" system, which multiplies your points for combos made within two seconds of each other. If the game's moving too slowly for you, you can press "1" to speed things up.
Speaking of speed, lag is Congo Cube's main weakness. The slow pace of the game and the unresponsiveness of its controls hurt the overall Congo Cube experience. I would gladly have sacrificed the huge Bad Baboon, which smugly bounces about the screen while you toil, for a small speed increase.
It's hard to enjoy a race against the clock when you can barely clock a slow crawl. Congo Cube is a terrifically fun puzzler and a great concept. In its current, lethargic form, however, it falls short of being truly addictive.
