Roogoo Tries For Round Two On Wii

Roogoo is a shape-matching puzzle game that came out last year on Xbox Live Arcade. The concept couldn't be much simpler--there are five shapes (square, star, heart, and so on) that drop from the sky, and you rotate a series of discs so the currently dropping block falls through the slot of the same shape. For whatever reason, the game didn't really catch on last year; publisher SouthPeak suspects the whimsical art style and bright color palette may have been incompatible with the Xbox audience (what with its preference for way more mature activities like headshots and teabagging).

If that's the case, the new Wii version, Roogoo: Twisted Towers, might have found a more accepting home. It brings the same basic puzzle gameplay over to the Nintendo console and adds a number of mechanics on top of it. For one, you've got an onscreen net-shaped cursor that you or a second player can wave around, Mario Galaxy-style; you use this to grab pieces that you've mismatched--which sends them flying off the side of the screen--and return them to play, instead of just losing them.

There are a few "boss" battles here, which amount to playing the game as normal with a big mean bad guy stomping around in the background. I fought a battle against a gigantic yeti who could occasionally interfere by fogging up the screen with ice crystals (removed with a few quick swipes of the Wii remote). After completing enough shapes successfully, the camera dropped to a low angle so I was firing stacks of shapes at the yeti to defeat him.

Since this is the Wii we're talking about, SouthPeak and developer SpiderMonk have wisely focused on multiplayer party modes in Twisted Towers. One of them is a cooperative mode where four people play the same game; each time a piece drops through a disc, another player gains control and has to spin the successive disc. There are also some head-to-head split-screen modes that let you pick up special weapons to piss off your opponent with. You can get moves like the same screen-covering ice attack the yeti used, or a weight that makes the other guy's pieces drop way faster.

Roogoo has a simple, easy premise that gets pretty hectic when the levels get faster and more intricate. It probably won't blow anyone's mind, but I'm glad pure puzzle games like this are still being made these days. SouthPeak kindly let us record our gameplay session when they stopped by the Giant Bomb basement, so here's a montage from that which shows off pretty much everything I just described. For reference, anywhere you see anyone winning anything, that's me playing. Believe it.