Rubik's World (Wii, 2008)

The iconic Rubik's Cube should be instantly recognizable to anyone who lived through the '80s. The colorful puzzle block even made a bit of a comeback in recent years, and people are still speed-cubing in competitions to make their mark. In Rubik's World, you don't have to worry about solving the cube if you don't want to, especially if you've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube without cheating and peeling off the stickers. Rubik's World transports you inside the popular cube so that you can see the supposed inner workings of the clever toy. What you'll find is a collection of challenging puzzle games that center around the individual cubes, also known as "cubies."

There are eight different modes that you can immediately dive into. Some include a collection of puzzles that are broken down into levels that you can access in any order. The ability to access all of the puzzles from the get-go is great, except that you'll most likely find yourself stuck early on, so it's not in your best interest to skip ahead. If you're a whiz at the original Rubik's Cube, those skills won't necessarily help you here (except of course if you play the mode designated to solving the colored cube). However, considering that the majority of the other modes require a lot more planning, strategy, and an extreme amount of patience, these qualities should already be part of your nature if you're remotely good at solving Rubik's Cube.

In Deconstruct mode, up to four players can take turns tossing little white cubies for points. You are given a limited number of cubes to knock off the green and blue cubes off the platform for a targeted amount of points. If you by chance knock over the other colors, your score will be lowered, which means that you can easily find yourself in the negatives. This might sound easy, but the cubes are stacked in some fairly intricate environments that make it extremely difficult to knock off the cubes. You'll also find situations in which all of the wrong colors are stacked on the ones you want to remove. You don't have much control over your throw in terms of power, so all you can do is change your trajectory.

Guide mode has colored cubes popping out of one area, and the goal is to put down flags to direct the cubes into their respective holes. The miniature blocks will roll in a straight line until they hit a roadblock or a flag, at which point they change direction. As the levels get progressively more difficult, you get access to flags that can make cubes stop, speed up, or slow down. This mode becomes tricky very quickly because your cubes can't collide with one another, either. It'll be common to see multiple cubes rolling in different directions, and you'll have to make sure that your cubes don't fall off of an elaborate structure. This is a challenging but intriguing mode to play in, given that the difficulty shoots up quickly.

There is a Fit mode in which you need to position your cubes or other shapes around the screen to match up with an empty slot so that when you trigger the wall to move toward you, your blocks won't get pushed off. Sometimes you'll need to do a balancing act because the hole is on the top of the screen and there is nothing to lean your blocks on. When you pick up the individual pieces, you can't rotate them unless you have them bounce off of the wall and fall over. This can be a bit of a pain because you're trying to build a balance tower and you need one piece to be on its side.