Lumines Remastered (PS4) Review

If you’re not familiar with Lumines, it’s a block puzzler with an emphasis on dance and electronic music that originally came out on the PSP in 2004 and did well enough to receive several other installments afterward, one of which is my fave Lumines Electronic Symphony on the Playstation Vita. This, as you can wildly guess, is a remaster of the original PSP game with some extra bells and whistles, which we’ll get into shortly.

You’re gonna first notice there’s several game modes available in the form of Challenge, Skin Edit, Time Attack, Puzzle, Mission, Vs CPU, and 2 Player Battle. Each one with the exception of Puzzle revolves around creating combos of as many single color 2 by 2 blocks as you can.

Challenge is the bulk of where most players will be as every few levels they unlock new “skins”, which are backgrounds and songs. The fun part about this is that while the gameplay doesn’t change, you’ll automatically see and hear new sights and sounds as you progress to the game’s goal of level 100. The tempo changes with each song, which will affect how you play. I will say that by the time I creeped up on level 30, I thought I had been playing for at least an hour and was starting to get bored. I don’t see myself being patient enough to hit 100.

Skin Edit is a grossly named mode where you can shuffle or hand pick the skins you’ve unlocked in Challenge and play them in any order you want. Personally I didn’t spend much time in this because the while some of the songs were catchy, I just didn’t really care to hear any of them that much. Also as a side note I’m really bad at this and maybe the good music is at the end, and the rest of us losers end up getting that “shake your body” song stuck in our heads.

Time Attack is where your goal is to clear as many blocks as you can before the time runs out. I’m sure nobody saw that coming at all.

Puzzle mode, in all honesty, made me want to break my controller and scream at my cats.

Puzzle mode, in all honesty, made me want to break my controller and scream at my cats. You have to make specific shapes, and quite simply put, I couldn’t do it. Not one. I sat there for about 30 minutes playing the first puzzle repeatedly until I walked away. It’s probably not that hard, and more likely that I am, in fact, an idiot. I looked at videos online of people playing it with no problems, which further reinforces my idiot theory.

Mission Mode however, I liked a lot. You’re tasked with creating combos to clear blocks in a certain amount of moves. I really enjoyed playing around with the possibilities to see what worked and what didn’t, and as odd as this sounds it reminds me of the trial mode in Street Fighter 4 and 5.

Vs CPU and 2 Player Battle are just battle modes. You clear blocks which pushes the border closer to your opponent and when they score it pushes it back to you. Somebody will poop the bed enough times that the other person will win. It was okay.

So what’s changed? Well, basically it’s just been rereleased for this console gen in HD and 4k. It’s a new coat of paint. If you played the original then you’ll notice that the chain blocks, which are those special ones that link to all adjacent same colored blocks, now activate immediately where my understanding is that in the original you could save them. Also you can use the rumble to feel the beat of the songs. I’m not a big rumble guy so I got no value out of this. Also just an aside but I would’ve enjoyed them adding in the ability to unlock songs via XP levels like in Electronic Symphony instead of having to actually progress to level 100 to get everything (in that mode at least). That way the rest of us can still see and hear what the game has to offer.

So what’s my verdict? It’s a fun puzzler that looks great and sounds okay, but at the end of my play time I felt like despite all the different modes, I was just doing the same thing over and over again, which I really started to notice after a little while. This is something I rarely notice with other puzzle games, or even with Lumines Electronic Symphony. Honestly playing this just made me want to dust off my Vita and play that version of Lumines again.