Originally posted June 2nd 2015 on the seafoam gaming forums

Title: Cube Creator 3D

System: 3DS (eShop)

Price: $7.99

Release date: 4/23/2015

The main game/story

In this world-building adventure heavily inspired by Minecraft, you set out to either build your own worlds or survive and explore pre-made ones. Not much of a story here, and if you know anything about Minecraft, this should feel very familiar to you in some ways, maybe a bit too familiar…

Graphics

Blocky and simplistic, which is pretty much like Minecraft in this regard. However the menus are a bit bland and not as easy to navigate, but besides that it looks very similar, though it does get the job done in terms of appearance.

Music and Sound:

This is where the game gets rather strange. The whole soundtrack has a generic feel to it, with relaxing music that doesn’t seem to fit anything that you do in this game, especially when it comes to building your own worlds. Very bland and forgettable.

Gameplay

On paper, this sounds like an awesome eShop title, especially with how fun the demo is! At first it seems promising. You can choose to either start up a survival mode, (Where you gather materials and craft them into items to survive.) or the main feature of this game, the world editor.

Right away when you pick either of these options, you are dropped in the middle of the game world, with not much at your disposal. (And while it does makes sense in survival mode, but in the editor mode it’s baffling) Yes, you can choose between multiple templates for the custom worlds, or import one from the demo version, but besides that all you really have are a few block options and a limited variety of items, which is rather disappointing considering how it takes forever to move around to a specific location and place blocks in ways you want to do it, even when flying around in the editor mode. I did make some neat underground dungeon areas in the World Editor, but besides that it didn’t seem to have my attention for long, with the survival mode having a more interesting if yet familiar concept.

The biggest issue is that there are no ways to share your levels or any multiplayer modes whatsoever. Not even via a QR code, which would have made it much more interesting as it could have been a brilliant use for miiverse! I realize that it’s difficult for small developers to use online capabilities, but I still think a QR code sharing feature would have been a massive improvement to this game.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while Cube Creator 3D does do an OK job at bringing a Minecraft experience to the 3DS, it does so a bit too much, with lots of similarities in the core gameplay but without some of the things that made Minecraft addicting for many people, such as multiplayer. If this game had online level sharing or some form of communication (Even local only), it would be worth the $7.99, but as it stands right now it’s incredibly underwhelming and I honestly can’t recommend it much in its current state. The developers did promise free updates to this title, which is a good thing for people still interested in this game, but in my honest opinion I feel that some things like multiplayer and level sharing should have been standard from the beginning. I give Cube Creator 3D a 4 out of 10. For now, check out the demo and see if it’s interesting to you. If it is, wait for future updates, but if it isn’t I would recommend looking for a different alternative.

Thanks to Big John Games for the review code.