Roogoo: Twisted Towers Review

The Wii has seen its fair share of party and puzzle games succeed on the system. Perhaps the ultimate one, Boom Blox, was in mind when the developers at SpiderMonk made Roogoo: Twisted Towers. Unfortunately while the two games share a cutesy art style, Roogoo plays nothing at all like Boom Blox. While Roogoo is pretty fun to say, it is considerably less fun to play.

Roogoo: Twisted Towers is based on one of the most simple puzzle solving premises ever: matching shapes and fitting them into the appropriate holes. Anyone that wore diapers at one time knows what I’m talking about. Now before your dirty mind runs wild on me, I of course mean squares, triangles and stars.

The idea behind Roogoo is to use shapes to build towers. You have a circular object with the holes in them which you can spin left or right in order to fit the falling objects into the correct spot. You can speed up the action to keep up with a timer that is put in place to make sure that you don’t go too slow. While it seems simple enough (and you can’t really get much simpler), it actually can get quite challenging when time is not on your side and you have to rush.

The most frustrating part of Roogoo is the fact that the camera moves all over the place. The developers pan the camera from one circle to the next, creating camera angles that unintentionally make the game difficult. Other than that gripe, there is very little to keep you interested. You can only slide objects through so many holes before it grows tiresome. The only action to liven things up is collecting butterflies. Yay! Exactly what I had in mind.

The sad thing is I’ve seen games on PSN and Xbox Live that both look and play better, yet this is a full retail release. Thankfully they had enough sense to give Roogoo a budget price of $30 – which is still a lot of money for a bad game. Young kids would probably have more fun playing with their Fisher Price toys while anyone above that age would be better off finding a more interesting concept. Unless you like to catch butterflies.