#379 Devil Dice

Posted: 10th October 2017 by Jeroen in Games
Tags: , , , , ,

639th played so far

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: Playstation
Year of Release: 1998
Developer: Shift
Publisher: SCEI/THQ

A puzzle game based on using dice? Thanks to a bit of a Playstation extravaganza week, we’re going to try and see how that one works.

Our Thoughts

There are a bunch of ways dice can be used in puzzles, and this game finds one suited to computer play. Your goal is first of all to match up dice in groups matching their face up numbers – so two twos, three threes and so on. You can add more matching faces after that for combos, as probably makes sense, but that should give you the basic idea. You can roll or push them – rolling giving you more flexibility although you actually need to be on top of dice to do that – but need to stay aware of the dice layout to make sure they all match after a while.

This worked nicely on the specific puzzles, although they are not necessarily the most complex – the limited number of moves and limits to the size of the puzzle made it difficult to do so. It might ramp up later, but I got a bit bored with it.

The larger play modes with ongoing spawns work a lot better – frantic as more blocks pop up and you get less room to maneuver. I quickly stopped paying loads of attention to the precise order of dice and just tried to get them back in place. It was still fun, but it did feel like it didn’t work for as long as the rounds lasted. Sure, having to play longer is nice, but I can restart anyway.

The CPU led multiplayer mode works the same, but again I felt disadvantaged as I didn’t quite develop the right eye for the game. It was still fun just running around, but the fact that you had to win made it tricky.

What it came down to is what I didn’t quite find the mode I liked in this game. Somewhere in between the simple puzzle mode and the ever spawning mode – possibly random fields or something, I’m not quite sure. It’s what makes me a bit down on this game, because it feels like it doesn’t quite get there.

  1. […] the system’s 3D capabilities but using the abstraction to not need complicated graphics. Devil Dice comes to mind as a similar game, as well as the Nintendo 64’s semi-tech demo Wetrix.ย  It […]