Tube Twist is a game you've played before, to be perfectly honest with you. Remember Pipe Dream? It's pretty much the same gaming paradigm. However, it is very unlikely that you've played a game as good as Tube Twist before. From all angles, Tube Twist and 21-6 Productions deliver a polished experience that is difficult not to enjoy.

The premise of Tube Twist is completely extraneous, but fun in an irreverent manner. You're the assistant in the lab of a groundbreaking professor who, through the machinations of experimentation, has managed to get lost in a time stream. Your job is to finish experiments that have been left in the wake of your time traveling boss and jump through time.

As I stated earlier, Tube Twist functions on a Pipe Dream style theme. Small blue and green energy particles known as macrotons must be guided via various tubes and funnels other devices into their energy chambers. Once all the experiments in a particular era have been completed, the power level will be high enough to warp the gamer to the next era. It's not as if the eras influence much in the way of gameplay beyond changing the background, but at each location another wrinkle is added to the gameplay to make things a little trickier as the gamer progresses.

Each stage in a particular era gives the player a hole-filled tube track to use as a starting point, along with a set number of tube pieces to use to fix and complete the track. Where Tube Twist really shines is in the free-form nature of the puzzle solving. Many puzzle games have a very clear, singular path that the gamer must follow to solve the level. Professor Fizzwizzle is an excellent example of this style of play. In Tube Twist, though, the gamer really gets the feeling that they can create and find their own path to the end of the level. I found myself, on each level, almost never using the preset pieces and paths to finish the level. It made me feel like a super-genius for creating my own path, even if that's exactly what 21-6 intended me to feel.

Does this mean that finding my own path was easy? Pfft. Don't make me laugh. Tube Twist is tricky. The energy balls are difficult to manage and must be helped along on every step of their path. Thankfully, by flicking an on-and-off switch in the game's interface, the gamer can test their paths as many times as they need to with no ill effects. Restarting each level or resetting the energy balls is an instant thing and makes it very easy to experiment with different arrangements to find just the right path.

Tube Twist makes quality, polished, puzzling gameplay seem effortless. The game is easy to pick up, hard to put down and a joy to interact with. I'd be hard pressed to recommend a title more than I do Tube Twist.


Graphics: +
It would have been painfully easy for 21-6 to make Tube Twist a flat, 2-D piece of graphical work. Instead, they modeled everything in nifty, full, scalable 3D. The game looks great. Macroton explosions yield cool particle clouds and everything looks very sharp. It can be hard at times to tell what direction the flow of your turbo tubes is running, but that's easy enough to get used to with some practice.

Sound: +
As with most puzzle games, I turn off the music to focus in on what I'm doing, but that has nothing to do with quality. When the music is on, it's good. I enjoy listening to it. It's not cheapy beeps and Casio pre-programmed tracks. The music sounds to me like a jaunty riff on music from the Simpsons. And considering I think Danny Elfman is about as pure genius as they come, that's high praise. The sound effects are robust, too. Each piece placed on the experiment gives a satisfying machine noise and the explosions of the macrotons look and sound satisfyingly catastrophic (which is good since you'll hear them a LOT).

Gameplay: +
For me, it's always important that puzzle games, or at least games that expect you to experiment and fail many times on your way to victory, make the turnaround time to restarting an attempt very fast and Tube Twist makes it simple. Simply flick the on switch on the screen back and forth to try out your experiment and again to go back to the building stage. It's quick and easy. I never found myself frustrated trying to work with all the pieces in Tube Twist.

Value: +
At $20.00 Tube Twist is still a great deal. It has superior production value on all fronts and even has expansion packs (beyond the initial 80 levels) set to be released in March, free to game owners.

Fun: +
As long as you find puzzle games fun, you'll like Tube Twist. Anyone who likes to be able to take their time and plot out their strategy to get ahead in a game will enjoy the pace of Tube Twist. It goes without saying that anyone seeking aliens to explode or cars to crash should look elsewhere. Puzzle fans would do well to at least check out the Tube Twist demo, they won't be disappointed.

Overall: "Buy"
Tube Twist is a fantastic title. The game looks good, sounds great and plays even better. It's a puzzler that really seems to support the solver's ability to find their own way through the problem and that makes the game very approachable. With this level of quality and the fact that two huge expansion packs are due out free of charge to game owners, there's little reason not to rush out to get this game right now.