Roogoo Twisted Towers! review

The basic premise of the game is unchanged from its Xbox origins: colored shapes fall from the sky and you have to press the B and Z buttons to rotate a series of platforms so the shapes fall through the right holes. The difficulty increases as more shapes are introduced, butterflies steal the shapes, and bad guys called Meemoos block the holes. It’s all fairly straightforward.

However, someone at Roogoo HQ clearly thought that the Wii game needed some kind of remote-waving functionality too, in order to prove that this isn’t just a quick conversion. As a result, some levels ask you to catch bats or fish by wafting a net around the screen with the remote as you spin the platforms with the buttons. It forces you to concentrate that bit harder, but it also spoils the purity of the shape-dropping puzzling.

The animal-catching confusion is magnified in the multiplayer modes, particularly in the co-operative four-player game when there’s a quartet of nets skittering across the screen, obscuring the view of the platforms. That said, the nets come in handy for scooping up dropped shapes if you’re playing with people who aren’t expert Roogooers.

This co-op mode is good fun, even though it can cause major arguments – as control shifts between players there’s frantic cussing as everyone has to stay alert for their turn to twist the platforms. If that sounds too stressful, the split-screen versus mode might be more for you. Tactically boosting your blocks downwards with the C button should give you the upper hand. Roogoo does get repetitive fairly quickly, despite the Wii-specific gimmicks, but it’s still a decent, if short-lived, puzzler.

Aug 11, 2009