Review: Roogoo: Twisted Towers

When Roogoo first hit the Xbox Live Arcade, I found it to be a wholly adorable and entertaining puzzler experience. I never expected it to launch into a full-fledged franchise with sequels and games crossing over to other platforms, but that’s exactly what happened. SouthPeak has hit a home run with this simple puzzler, though its Wii iteration leaves much to be desired. Roogoo: Twisted Towers for the Wii offers up some puzzle fun… if you can get past some completely ridiculous camera angles.

For the uninitiated, Roogoo is a take on the classic “peg-in-a-hole” game that you might have enjoyed as a child, fitting pegs with different shaped ends (stars, circles, squares) through a wooden faceplate in order to demonstrate your awesome powers of hand-eye coordination. Geometric shapes will fall from the sky in the same premise, and it’s your job to rotate an aerial platform in order to catch the falling shapes through the correct holes. Rather than letting one shape through at a time, however, you’ll learn to stack and strategize your way through numerous shapes at a time in order to create a hectic puzzler experience.

Roogoo will toss five different shapes at you, such as hearts, stars, and cylinders. Using the Wii remote’s B button as well as the Z button on the Nunchuk, the glut of gameplay focuses on the rotation of puzzle pillars for the shaped blocks to fit through and reach the bottom. But be careful - some levels will find the evil (but still horrifically cute) Meemoos popping up around the holes in order to thwart your shape-stacking exploits. You’ll need to watch out for them quite often, as well as keep your eyes on the prize when it comes to rotating and swapping discs. It sounds quit simple, I’m sure, and it is. For the first ten to twenty levels, it’s absolute cake and you’ll really feel as though you’re getting the hang of things. There isn’t too much rotation required in order to get all of the falling shapes through each hole. Then, when you least expect it, the game tosses an overwhelmingly terrible amount of disastrous camera angles at you. That’s where things get rather ugly. Unlike most puzzle titles, Roogoo: Twisted Towers does not take place only on one plane or tower in some stationary environment. Towers are spread throughout the land in-game, and thus you are granted awkward perspectives with which to explore the rotating disc for the level that you are currently on. Perhaps it was felt that a rather cinematic angle encompassing the play area would set Roogoo out from the droves of puzzle games out there, but all it really did was hinder your ability to play the game correctly. Often, the camera will swoop over and away from just where you’d need it to be in order to see the glowing selection ring around the base of the disc you need to rotate, completely obscuring your view once the shapes start falling. Once the shapes begin to pick up speed, it’s nearly impossible to direct them appropriately in order to pass the shapes through in a timely manner. For a game that depends on your quick reflexes and hand-eye coordination, this is an unacceptable flaw. Granted, you’re not subjected to this outrageous design error throughout every single level, but it’s so prevalent that playing the game begins to become more and more like homework as you struggle to discern where your blocks are dropping and which platform you’re actually rotating, leading to more mistakes than is feasible. Twisted Towers’ saving grace comes in the form of the fact that it has some truly engaging boss battles with that of pirates, bats, and other creatures of fancy. You’ll find the boss encounters a wonderful change of pace from the higher levels when it becomes overly difficult to discern correct block placement due to the wicked camera angles. It’s really quite a shame that the camera had to be such a source of disappointment when the game could be all sorts of fun, as it even avoids the common Wii-controlled puzzler pitfalls such as terrible controls.

In between regular levels of the game you’ll undertake some rather strange skydiving segments that remind me of Tempest or Space Giraffe in that you’ll be collecting shapes and eliminating Meemoos and various other threats that would dare hinder your arrival at the bottom of an area. These areas were most likely thrown in to add a bit of spice and variety and break up the monotony a bit between puzzle-solving, but they end up feeling hokey and out of place for a cutesy game such as this one. Where the real “thrill” comes from in Roogoo is simply trying to figure out where your puzzling is going to take place next, as there are tons of interesting environments to check out along the way with some gorgeous visuals.

Roogoo: Twisted Towers has so much promise with its fresh premise, endearing characters, and affordable price. However, the developers seem to have forgotten that in order to successfully solve any puzzle, you must be able to see the pieces involved in order to fit them together again which is entirely not possible a good 50% of the time in this Wii iteration of the Xbox Live, PC, and Nintendo DS title. The same problems plague all versions of the games, so hopefully in the future it will be taken care of so all that we are left with are devlish Meemoos, the cute little Roogoos, and tons of shapes and holes with which to fit them through. If you’re craving a puzzler this one is hard to recommend despite all of its high points. Perhaps you’re better off with Pokémon Puzzle League, even though you’ve played it to death.

Doin’ It RIGHT:

- It’s adorable, to say the least.

- Unique idea for a puzzler.

- Varied locations.

- Enjoyable boss battles.

Doin’ It RONG:

- The camera angles get absolutely insufferable.

- Levels meant to break up the monotony feel out of place.

- There isn’t a whole lot of meat to the gameplay.